The ocean is mysterious in itself, it is an element hostile to man. But there are areas where fear is overwhelming. Mysterious disappearances of planes, crews and ships, sucking whirlpools of global and local importance, standing waves over 30 meters high and mysterious glowing circles. It is interesting that there is one zone in the world's oceans where all these phenomena are present, and this …
Bermuda Triangle
The area is bounded by lines from Florida to Bermuda, then to Puerto Rico and back to Florida through the Bahamas, and covers an area of about one million square kilometers. Mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft in this area were first discussed at the end of the 40s of the last century. On December 5, 1945, a flight of five Avenger bombers did not return from flight. The last words of the pilots were that they are completely disoriented and enter the "white water". The seaplane sent to rescue also suddenly disappeared. For half a century, the list of missing ships and aircraft is about 50 cases. However, since the mid-1980s, the triangle has significantly reduced appetite.
and half a century of what only crazy theories have been put forward. From pseudoscientific to fantastic, right up to aliens and otherworldly forces. The most credible theory came from Joseph Monaghan of Australia's Monash University. In 2003, he published an article in the American Journal of Physics "Can a bubble swallow a ship?" There, by modeling, he showed that this is possible. The theory was supported by other scientists, including Russian ones.
Its essence is as follows. At the bottom of the ocean in this area there are significant reserves of gas hydrate - methane and hydrogen sulfide. Under conditions of tectonic activity, methane from a solid state passes into a gaseous state and breaks up through the water column in the form of a bubble. Gases, concentrating at the surface, can disrupt the operation of control systems of ships and aircraft and, due to a sharp drop in the density of water in this place, sink ships.
The second Bermuda phenomenon that needs to be explained is the Flying Dutchman phenomenon, that is, the loss of the crew while keeping the ship intact. The most likely cause of such incidents is infrasound. According to some scientists, it is created by the same gas bubbles, escaping into the atmosphere, at a frequency of 8-12 hertz, which is dangerous for humans. Others - that during a storm or strong wind over the ocean surface, air flow disruptions can occur on the crests of sea waters, causing low-frequency air vibrations.
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Be that as it may, infrasound causes a dangerous resonance of the heart and blood vessels, causes people to feel panic and unaccountable fear. Perhaps the sailors threw themselves overboard in panic to get rid of him. However, it is still not clear how to explain the fact that in the mid-80s the Bermuda Triangle stopped swallowing large victims. Many, for example, Lawrence David Kusche, author of the book "The Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle" (1975), explain this by the fact that there is no mystery, it was invented and fed by people.
For the first time, he approached the problem seriously, studied the files of the insurance companies, the reports of the Coast Guard, weather reports, and official investigations. Nevertheless, the sad primacy of the Bermuda Triangle in the list of the most mysterious places in the world oceans, in addition to statistics, is justified by several features. It is one of two zones on Earth (the other is the Devil's Sea) where magnetic compasses point exactly to the actual, not magnetic south.
In addition, the spacecraft recorded large deviations in the force of gravity here. It is here more than the average for the planet, which determines the formation of the planetary warm current of the Gulf Stream and its movement to the north of Europe. As for the significant decrease in the number of mysterious disasters, many explain this with the emergence of space navigation and the improvement of the technical equipment of ships and aircraft.
Sargasso Sea
The Sargasso Sea, located southeast of it, is often confused with the Bermuda Triangle. Moreover, many are looking for a clue to the mysterious phenomena in the Bermuda Triangle there. However, the phenomenon is different from Bermuda. The sea is located in the center of the Atlantic, and has its own name due to one peculiarity. Oceanic currents there move clockwise, and in the water area outlined by them, a large amount of sargassum algae, and now also anthropogenic debris, has accumulated.
The sea, revolving in a giant funnel, lives its own life. The water temperature inside is much warmer than outside. It is almost always calm here, you can observe amazing mirages, for example, when the sun, as it were, rises simultaneously in the east and in the west. It is a spawning area for many species of fish and, finally, it is a seismically active area. Of course, sailors' stories that seaweed are carnivorous and devour sailors have sunk into oblivion, but a scientist from the University of Western Australia, Richard Sylvester, put forward the theory that the giant swirl of the Sargasso Sea is a centrifuge that creates smaller eddies that reach the Bermuda Triangle. These eddies give rise to "mini-cyclones" in the air, which are formed from the rotation of water and, as if continuing to move in a spiral, suck in and can sink small planes.
Devil's Sea
This area is located in the Pacific Ocean with peaks from a point in the ocean 100 kilometers south of Tokyo, from there to the northern part of the Philippine Islands and to the island of Guam. The younger brother of the Bermuda Triangle is not marked on any map, but sailors today bypass this area. Here storms suddenly begin, giving way to dead swells. There are no whales, dolphins, or even birds. In five years in the early 1950s, nine ships disappeared in the area. The most famous case took place in 1955, when the scientific expedition "Kale-maru-5" disappeared without a trace.
This zone is extremely active seismically. The seabed is in the process of active formation, and volcanic islands disappear as quickly as they appear. Therefore, various shipwrecks can be attributed to navigation errors. However, the main reason is more prosaic - it is extremely active cyclonic activity. It is here that tropical cyclones and typhoons rage, originating in various regions of the western Pacific Ocean, in the South China Sea, near the Mariana Islands and the Philippine Islands. Most of them traverse the Devil's Sea.
Strait of Good Hope
An area off the coast of South Africa called the Strait of Good Hope (or Cape of Tempests). Here, over hundreds of years, a large number of ships really wrecked. The reasons for the tragedies are unstable weather and, of course, "killer waves", or caprollers (from the English words sare - "cape" and roller - "shaft", "big wave"). Oceanologists also call them "solitary or episodic waves."
These are huge steep waves, the height of which can reach over 30 meters. They are formed when two coherent waves (or interference) are superimposed, while the height of the keyproller is equal to the sum of the heights of these waves. They do not change their shape in the process of spreading, even when interacting with their own kind and can spread over very long distances without losing their energy. Depressions of the same depth are formed in front of such waves. There are other areas in the ocean where killer waves are recorded, but the area near the Cape of Good Hope is especially bloodthirsty.
Eastern Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf
This area is characterized by an impressive and mysterious phenomenon - giant glowing and rotating circles on the surface of the water. At one time, the hypothesis of the German oceanologist Kurt Kalle was trusted, according to which luminous formations in the ocean arise as a result of underwater earthquakes that excite plankton glow. Since this effect is selective, the illusion of a spinning wheel arises.
However, in recent years, this hypothesis has been criticized, since it is powerless to explain the logic in the transformations of these luminous formations. But until now, scientists have not explained their regular circular shape and rays that emanate from one center, as well as the tremendous speed of their circulation. In this case, the version of the UFO is quite seriously discussed.
Maelstrom Maelstrom
This whirlpool is not of a planetary scale, like the whirlpool of the Sargasso Sea, and nevertheless, sailors will tell dozens of chilling stories about the terrible abyss of Malstrom. A whirlpool occurs twice a day, in the western part of the Westfjord in the Norwegian Sea off the northwestern coast of Norway. His name is known from the story of Edgar Poe "The Overthrow in Maelstrom" (1841), in which the author himself acted as a narrator about the distraught forces of nature. In the center of this mighty crater there is a depression, the water level in which is several tens of meters below ocean level. According to oceanologists, the energy of the whirlpool is ten times the energy of a normal current.
And the strangest thing is that about once every hundred days, the whirlpool changes its direction to the opposite. Like standing waves, maelstroms like Maelstrom exist elsewhere (including the Bermuda Triangle). Under ideal, uncomplicated conditions, the Malstroms are commonly believed to rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere, which is associated with the rotation of the Earth.
However, local topographic and hydrographic conditions often trump this pattern. These include: the meeting of opposing tidal or sea currents, winds, the presence of rocks and reefs, uneven bottom, natural slopes, the action of gravity, or a combination of these elements.
LYUBOV STEPUSHOVA