By Brett Prince (photography and story)

There are places where the ocean behaves exactly as expected. Then there is The Wedge. At the southern end of Newport Beach, California, the Pacific Ocean can suddenly rise into enormous walls of waves that fold over themselves, explode into whitewater and send plumes of spray high above the shoreline.

Through the camera lens, the scale of the wave becomes difficult to comprehend. A surfer drops beneath a towering wall of blue-green water and, for an instant, they becomes the smallest thing in the photograph. The ocean engulfs them.

The Wedge is both mesmerizing and humbling. I have learned from my own experience as a grom surfer that there is a tremendous difference between watching the ocean and being inside it. At The Wedge, that difference is impossible to ignore.

Why Is The Wedge So Big

The Wedge is often called a “freak wave,” but its creation is rooted in physics. When a powerful south swell reaches Newport Harbor, part of the wave strikes the east jetty — constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1930s — and reflects back toward the incoming surf. The reflected wave collides with the next arriving swell, creating constructive interference that amplifies both its height and power. The result is a steep, triangular wall of water that can be nearly twice the size of surrounding surf and breaks in only a few feet of water. This is what has made The Wedge legendary.

The effect transforms what might be an eight-foot swell elsewhere along Orange County into waves exceeding twenty feet at The Wedge. On the largest swells, thirty-foot faces are possible, attracting elite bodysurfers, bodyboarders, photographers and spectators from around the world. But the energy behind that wave may have begun its journey thousands of miles away. 

How Ocean Swells Travel From Distant Storms to The Wedge

Wind transfers energy into the ocean. Before a wave forms at The Wedge, there is often a storm somewhere else. That energy organizes into swell and begins traveling outward, continuing across the Pacific long after the weather system that created it has moved on. The storm disappears. Its energy does not. Eventually, some of it reaches California.

When a powerful south swell approaches Newport Beach at precisely the right angle, The Wedge takes that distant energy and transforms it into something almost architectural — a wall of water rising from what, moments earlier, appeared to be ordinary ocean.

Recent hurricane-driven swells have made those forces particularly visible. Powerful surf has stripped enormous amounts of sand from The Wedge, exposing rocks, concrete, metal and remnants of infrastructure that had been buried beneath the beach for decades. The ocean is quite literally uncovering history.

And it is happening as something much larger develops across the Pacific.

What Is a Super El Niño and How Strong Will It Be?

That “something” is a strengthening an El Niño. As of late August 2026, NOAA reports that El Niño conditions are present and expected to intensify through the Northern Hemisphere winter of 2026 to 2027. Current forecasts give the developing event a greater than 90% chance of becoming very strong, potentially placing it among the most significant El Niños in the modern observational record.

An exceptionally strong event is sometimes popularly called a “Super El Niño.” It is not an official scientific classification. And it is too early to know exactly how powerful this El Niño will ultimately become, but something significant is happening across the Pacific.

During an El Niño, weakened trade winds allow unusually warm surface water to shift eastward across the tropical Pacific. That enormous redistribution of ocean heat changes atmospheric circulation and can alter the Pacific jet stream and weather patterns thousands of miles away. Along the West Coast, an El Niño can also contribute to elevated coastal water levels, making the combination of high tides, storms and powerful surf increasingly consequential.

How El Niño and Rising Seas Are Eroding the California Coast

The photographs reveal more than athleticism and cool waves. They capture enormous volumes of water compressed into seconds. The spray drifting hundreds of feet into the air demonstrates the tremendous energy released when these waves collapse onto the shallow shoreline. That same force shapes beaches.

Large winter storms strip sand from the coast, carve away dunes, expose buried structures and accelerate shoreline erosion. During recent powerful south swells, observers reported that erosion near The Wedge exposed remnants of old infrastructure long buried beneath the sand.  Along the beaches of Newport and Huntington, they exposed tar from an old oil spill is piling onto the beach in smelly chunks. A reminder that coastlines are constantly altering landscapes.

Across California, rising sea levels combined with periodic high-energy storms are expected to increase coastal flooding and erosion during the coming decades. While no single storm can be attributed solely to climate change, warmer oceans and higher sea levels increase the potential consequences when major swell events occur.

A Living Laboratory

For coastal scientists, The Wedge is more than a famous surf break. It is a natural laboratory where engineering, geology, meteorology, and oceanography intersect. The jetty reflects wave energy. The underwater topography focuses it. Long-period swells deliver it. The beach slope causes it to break explosively. Every variable must align perfectly.

Through the Lens

Photographers wait for these rare moments because they reveal something most beaches never display: the raw mechanics of ocean energy.

Perhaps photographs communicate that reality differently than graphs ever could. Look at the surfer. The wave rises behind him until he becomes little more than a measurement of scale. Water curls overhead. Thousands of gallons begin to fall. Spray becomes airborne mist. Then everything collapses. Seconds later, the wave is gone.

Respecting the Ocean

There is an irony to The Wedge. A man-made harbor improvement accidentally created one of the world’s most famous waves. Today that same wave reminds us that humans continue to influence coastlines in ways both intended and unintended.

Whether through harbor construction, shoreline development or the global warming that is changing our oceans, people have become participants in coastal evolution. Standing on the beach during a major swell, it is easy to see only excitement — a surfer disappearing beneath a collapsing barrel, spectators cheering from the sand, cameras firing hundreds of frames each minute. But these images also document something larger.

They record the immense energy moving through our oceans, the power of storms born thousands of miles away, and the increasingly dynamic relationship between climate and the California coastline.

The Wedge remains one of nature’s greatest spectacles, not because it defies science, but because it so beautifully demonstrates it. And perhaps a warning written not in words, but in water pay attention.

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