Or in general, how do they go through unexpected earthquakes or anything of the sort, since we rarely hear about cruise ships crashing?
In: 6
Point your nose in the waves. And then do the rollercoaster dance.
If you don’t have engine power to do that, well you get a big permanent submarine full of non-moving zombies.
Seriously, the hull can take massive waves nose first and shrug them off. It’s designed for that. Waves coming onto the side are another thing. Not much the low frequency tsunami ones, those are very very long waves and the ship will be more like “lifted by an elevator” than actually being on a wave. Tsunami is otherwise devastating to land because the long wave will crash onto land with so much water in it (due to be very long) that it can simply submerge a region before stopping.
Ship wise, the most devastating are storm waves because they are shorter in lenght and more mixed in direction, so you get hit more randomly and frequently, plus you can get “killer lenght” waves that basically are as long as your ship. This means while you pass each wave crest the center of the ship is raised with nose and stern out of the water, potentially snapping a ship in half. Of course the design accounts for it, but you prefer to run away and around the storm instead of live testing the design with some thousand scared people on board. And it’s quite easy to go around a storm.
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