Quote:
Originally Posted by Daigoro
I think geography is sufficient explanation, unless you want more. IANAmeteorologist, but I understand that an ocean world without large land masses would naturally have crazy storms happening constantly.
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The lack of land to act as a break means that waves propagate further, giving them more time to grow. Basically you end up with monster-sized waves. Any island that is not very, very tall is periodically going to be swamped by massive tidal-waves and/or giant hurricanes. You might have a situation where a large island acts as a break for a smaller island, but if the currents ever shift it could still get swamped. The only way to survive would be in caves that you could seal up very well until the wave had passed. There would probably be a lot of cultural effort, tradition, and customs dedicated to detecting incoming waves and storms and surviving them. Floating cities may also work; they would just ride up and over the wave if the scales were right. (i.e. city small enough to ride wave and not tip over/wave big enough). Hurricanes might still trash them though, unless the cities were mostly submerged with only a bit on top, like an iceberg.
A cluster of islands might have a better chance of long-term survival. The outer islands in the cluster would break up the waves to protect the inner islands. An island in the middle of a huge asteroid crater would also have some protection; the 'walls' of the crater would help break the waves before they reached the island in the center.
Another possibility is to have large-ish land masses to break the waves, but for whatever reason they are mostly uninhabitable and only the islands are fertile.