The Atlantic Ocean has been known to human civilization since time immemorial. It was here, according to ancient legends, that the mysterious island of Atlantis was located, which went under water seventeen thousand years ago. A warlike and courageous people (Atlanteans) lived on it, and the god Poseidon reigned over it along with his wife Kleito. Their eldest son's name was Atlan. In his honor, the boundless sea washing this land was named Atlantic.
The mysterious civilization has sunk into oblivion, the sea was renamed to the ocean, but the name remained. The secrets of the Atlantic Ocean have not disappeared. Over the centuries, their number has disappeared. But before you get acquainted with everything unusual and mysterious, you need to get a general idea of the majestic waters washing simultaneously the shores of hot Africa, and the land of old Europe, and the distant rocky coast of the American continent covered with a haze of fairy tales.
Today, the Atlantic Ocean is called a huge body of water on planet Earth, which accounts for 25% of the world's oceans. Its area is almost 92 million km², together with the adjacent seas and the Atlantic part of the Southern Ocean. From north to south, the waters of the Atlantic stretch for 15.5 thousand km, and from west to east, in the narrowest part (from Brazil to Liberia), they have a width of 2.8 thousand km.
If we take the distance of Atlantic waters from the western coast of the Gulf of Mexico to the eastern coast of the Black Sea, then there will be a completely different figure - 13.5 thousand km. The depth of the ocean is also a great difference. Its average value is 3600 m, and the maximum is recorded in the Puerto Rico trench and corresponds to 8742 meters.
The Atlantic floor is divided lengthwise by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It exactly repeats the outlines of a huge reservoir and stretches in a wide winding mountainous chain: from the north - from the Reykjanes ridge (Iceland) to the African-Antarctic ridge in the south (Bouvet Island), going beyond the boundary of the Arctic ice.
To the right and to the left of the ridge are scattered depressions, troughs, faults, small ridges, which make the relief of the oceanic bottom very complex and confusing. The coastline (especially in northern latitudes) also has a complex structure. It is heavily indented by small bays, has vast water areas that cut deep into the land and form seas. An integral part is also the numerous straits in the coastal zone of the continents, as well as straits and channels connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
The Atlantic Ocean washes the shores of 96 state entities. It owns 14 seas and 4 large bays. The diverse climates in these geographic and geological parts of the earth's surface are driven by numerous surface currents. They flow deeply in all directions and are subdivided into warm and cold.
In the northern latitudes, up to the equator, the North Passat, Gulf Stream and North Atlantic currents dominate. They carry warm waters and delight the world around them with a mild climate and high temperatures. The same cannot be said about the Labrador and Canary currents. The latter are cold and create frosty and slushy weather on the adjacent lands.
Promotional video:
South of the equator, the picture is the same. The warm South Passat, Guinean and Brazilian currents rule the ball here. Cold Western Winds and Bengalskoe try not to be inferior to their more humane colleagues and also make their feasible negative contribution to the formation of the climate of the southern hemisphere. In general, the average temperature on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean is plus 16 ° Celsius. At the equator, it can reach 28 ° Celsius. But in the northern latitudes it is very cold - here the water freezes.
Icebergs of the Atlantic
From the above, it is easy to guess that from the north and south the waters of the Atlantic are squeezed by eternal giant ice crusts. True, at the expense of eternity, a little too much, since often very large blocks of ice break off from them and begin to slowly drift towards the equator. Such blocks are called icebergs, and they move north of Greenland up to 40 ° N. w, and in the south of Antarctica to 40 ° S. sh. Their remains are also observed closer to the equator, reaching 31-35 ° south and north latitudes.
Very large sizes are a loose concept. More specifically, there are icebergs, the length of which is tens of kilometers, and the area sometimes exceeds 1000 km². These ice floes can travel across the ocean for years, hiding their true size under the water surface.
The fact is that a blue mountain of ice shines above the water, which corresponds to only 10% of the total volume of the iceberg. The remaining 90% of this block is hidden in the ocean depths due to the fact that the density of ice does not exceed 940 kg / m³, and the density of sea water on the surface varies from 1000 to 1028 kg / m³. The usual average height of an iceberg, as a rule, corresponds to 28-30 meters, while its underwater part is just over 100-120 meters.
Meeting such a sea traveler has never been a joy for ships. He poses the greatest danger already in adulthood. By this time, the iceberg thaws significantly, its center of gravity shifts, and a huge block of ice turns over. Its underwater part is above the water. It does not shine blue, but is a dark blue ice cap, which, especially in poor visibility conditions, is very difficult to distinguish on the ocean surface.
The sinking of the Titanic
A typical example of the insidiousness of floating ice blocks is the sinking of the Titanic, which occurred on the night of April 14-15, 1912. It sank 2 hours 40 minutes after colliding with an iceberg in the northern waters of the Atlantic Ocean (41 ° 43 ′ 55 ″ N, 49 ° 56 ′ 45 ″ E). The result was the death of 1,496 passengers and crew.
True, you need to make a reservation right away: it is rather imprudent to attribute everything to the "lost" iceberg. This shipwreck is one of the greatest mysteries of the Atlantic Ocean today. There is still no solution to the causes of the tragedy, although there are a great many different beliefs and assumptions.
It is assumed that the largest passenger ship in the world (length 269 m, width 28.2 m, displacement 46,300 tons) collided with an iceberg, which was of venerable age and apparently turned over in the water more than once. Its dark surface did not give reflections, it merged with the water surface of the ocean, so it was very difficult to notice a huge floating ice block in time. The culprit of the tragedy was identified only when he was at a distance of 450 meters from the vessel, and not 4-6 km, as usually happens in such situations.
The sinking of the Titanic made a lot of noise. It was a worldwide sensation at the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century. Mostly everyone was amazed - how could such a huge and reliable ship sink so quickly, dragging hundreds and hundreds of unfortunate people to the bottom. Nowadays, many researchers tend to see the true causes of the terrible tragedy not in the ill-fated iceberg (although very few deny its indirect role), but in completely other factors, which for some reason, at one time, were hidden from the general public.
Versions, guesses, assumptions
The official conclusion of the commission to investigate the disaster was unambiguous - the ice of the Atlantic turned out to be stronger than steel. He ripped open the underwater hull of the Titanic like a tin can. The wound was terrible: its length reached 100 meters, and of the sixteen watertight compartments, six were damaged. This turned out to be enough for the proud Briton to sink to the bottom and forever calm down at a great depth, taking human lives and colossal material values with him to the sea soil.
Such a verdict is not convincing for a specialist, and a person far from shipbuilding understands that carrying the hull of a huge liner plowing the oceans cannot resemble a tin can in any way. The thawed ice of the old iceberg also does not have sufficient hardness, which, judging by the conclusion, should have surpassed the strength of a diamond in order to weed the steel skin of a multi-ton passenger ship by tens of meters.
You can build various assumptions and hypotheses for as long as you like, but only practical research can give answers to all questions. In this situation, given the depth at which the Titanic lay, exploration work became possible no earlier than the 80s of the XX century. It was by this time that deep-sea vehicles appeared, capable of staying at a depth of 4 kilometers for a long time.
The first such swallow was the expedition of the American oceanographer Robert Ballard, which in September 1985 arrived at the scene of the tragedy on the ship Knor. She was armed with a deep-water towed complex "Argo". It was he who determined the depth of the Titanic's remains. The water column in this place was 3,750 meters. The vessel lay on the seabed, split into two parts, the distance between them was equal to about 600 meters.
No visible damage was found that caused the death of the ocean liner. Robert Ballard considered that they were hidden by the ground, in which the multi-ton structure was bogged down. A laceration wound on the Titanic's hull was not found during the second expedition organized by an American scientist in 1986.
French and American specialists followed the beaten track. In the summer of 1987, they arrived in the Atlantic Ocean and spent two long months at the crash site. Using the Nautil deep-sea vehicle, the researchers lifted from the bottom more than 900 objects on board the sunken ship. These were samples of ship utensils, some of which ended up in museums, and some were sold to private collections.
The underwater vehicle examines the sunken Titanic.
Finally, in 1991, the ship Akademik Mstislav Keldysh arrived at the site of the sinking of the Titanic. On board was an international research expedition led by Canadian geologist-oceanographer Steve Blask. The expedition had at its disposal two autonomous underwater vehicles Mir-1 and Mir-2. The researchers made 38 dives on them. The hull of the ship was examined, a sample of the side plating was taken, films, video and photographs were taken.
Despite all the efforts, no ragged hole, several tens of meters long, was found. But they managed to find a hole, the size of which did not exceed a square meter, and numerous cracks were noticed along the lines of rivets.
A piece of steel that broke away from the Titanic's hull was sent for testing. He was tested for metal brittleness - the conclusion was not comforting: the prototype was amazingly fragile. This could be attributed to the long 80 years on the seabed, which significantly affected the properties of steel. Therefore, for the objectivity of the picture, a similar piece of metal was tested, preserved at the shipyard since 1911. The result was much the same.
Believe it or not, the Titanic's hull did not meet regulatory requirements. It was made from a material with a high sulfur content. The latter gave the steel structure high brittleness, which, in combination with icy water, made it very fragile.
If the body were made of steel that meets all the standards and requirements, then after contact with the iceberg, it would bend, but retain its integrity. In this situation, the ship hit the starboard side of the iceberg - and the impact was of small force, but the fragile skin of the Titanic could not withstand it either. It split along the rivet lines below the waterline. Ice water poured into the holes formed, which instantly filled the lower compartments and, most likely, caused an explosion of red-hot steam boilers.
The huge ship began to plunge rapidly into the waters of the Atlantic. According to eyewitnesses, the Titanic initially sank on an even keel, which indicates that the lower compartments were filled with water evenly. Then a nose trim appeared. The stern began to rise up, reached a vertical position, and the multi-ton colossus very quickly went to the bottom. Already at great depth, due to high pressure, the Titanic split into two parts, which were pulled along the ocean floor by more than 500 meters.
Who benefits from the sinking of the Titanic?
It turns out that this disaster has nothing to do with the secrets of the Atlantic Ocean: everything seems to be clear. No, there is no need to rush to conclusions. As already mentioned, there are many versions of the death of the ocean liner, and among them there is not one that can be called the ultimate truth. There are many other assumptions, opinions of very authoritative people who view the cause of the terrible disaster from a completely different angle.
So to this day, there is a version that the culprit of the accident was the White Star Line company itself - the owner of the ship. It was her leaders who initially planned the construction of the Titanic with gross violations of all possible rules and regulations. The goal of this grand scam was to get huge insurance coverage that could fix the company's precarious financial position and save it from total collapse.
That is why the ocean liner, despite warnings about icebergs from ships in the same area, went at the maximum possible speed (20.5 miles per hour). The captain of the ship had only one task - to provoke a collision of the Titanic with a huge floating ice floe.
Most likely, no one could even imagine such a number of dead people, since according to all calculations it turned out that the ship would sink for a long time. The main stake was placed on rescue ships, which had to have enough time to get to the scene of the tragedy and have time to save all passengers and valuables on board. However, an unpredictable fate made its own adjustments to the original scenario.
In addition to this rather dubious and shaky version, there is another. It's a coal bunker fire. During long-term storage, the lower layers of coal begin to smolder, releasing an explosive gas. The temperature gradually increases, the concentration of gas vapors increases. In such a situation, the explosion can occur from a normal shock. The collision with the iceberg was the detonator that caused a huge surge of energy, tore apart and collapse the entire lower part of the ship.
In short, even today there is no consensus about the causes of the terrible tragedy. Only the remains of a ship, resting at great depths, can reveal this secret of the Atlantic Ocean. Their scrupulous study by dozens of specialists is possible only in normal terrestrial conditions. To do this, you need to lift the "Titanic" from the bottom of a huge reservoir.
Technically, this is extremely difficult to implement. As for the financial side of the issue, the picture is different. Although such work will cost crazy money, it will more than pay off. After all, we must not forget that there are 10 million pounds of gold bars on the ship. There are also stored jewelry, diamonds, jewelry of the richest people in the world who sailed on this ship. Fragments of the "Titanic" case, the remains of the interior, dishes will go from auctions "with a bang" at fabulous prices.
If we consider the unfortunate Titanic as a source of material wealth, then he is by no means alone. The bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is the Klondike, Eldorado. Here lies a huge number of ships, which are simply filled with precious metals, diamonds, and other valuables that can make anyone who gets to them rich. This is exactly the whole question: to break through the oceanic waters is an impossible task not only for individual adventurers, but also for serious companies and solid financial structures.
Underwater ship graveyards
At the beginning of the 21st century, there are many companies specializing in the search for sunken ships. The game is worth the candle, since according to experts, at least 80,000 ships of all countries and peoples that have been shipwrecked over the past 400 years, with valuables worth 600 billion dollars on board, rest on the bottom of the Atlantic alone.
One of these companies, the American company Odyssey, discovered in 2007, in the Canary Islands region, a Spanish sailing ship. On board there were 500 thousand old gold and silver coins. Their total weight reached 17 tons, and the cost was equal to $ 500 million. This is $ 100 million more than the wealth that was raised in 1985 from a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of Florida in the twenties of the 17th century.
The lion's share of all the values that went to the bottom of the ocean in the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries rests precisely on Spanish ships, which in a continuous caravan carried gold, silver, precious stones and products from them to Europe from America from America.
In theory, the good obtained in this way cannot be the property of the state. The Spanish government judged otherwise. At the beginning of the XXI century, it declared 800 Spanish ships that sank in the XVI-XVIII centuries, transporting illegally acquired utensils, as a national treasure. The monetary equivalent of all this wealth is estimated at $ 130 billion.
Underwater treasures are available to search teams in the Atlantic coastal areas. Here, as a rule, ships were drowned, having run into shallows or reefs. On the endless expanses of water, where under the keel lies at least 3,000 meters, galleons, brigantines, frigates, and then steamships, motor ships, yachts, battleships went to the bottom, experiencing all the power and strength of ocean storms (the height of the waves in the Atlantic often reaches 10-15 meters) or the insidiousness and cruelty of pirate ships and enemy submarines during the years of hostilities.
The ratio of ships that have sunk in coastal zones and in the open ocean over the past 400 years is 85 to 15. That is, it turns out that the closer to the coast, the more dangerous. Only every seventh ship perished in the endless and majestic expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, the rest of the floating facilities sank in the visibility of their own or foreign shores, which, as they say, were within easy reach.
One of the largest underwater cemeteries is the English Channel. Its length is 560 km, width in the west is 240 km, in the east is 32 km, and the average depth is 63 m. Only in some places the depth exceeds this mark and reaches 170 m. There are many shoals, frequent fogs. Countless ships rest at the bottom of the strait, especially in its western part.
In terms of the number of shipwrecks, the waters in the area of Cape Hatteras (North Carolina, USA) are not lagging behind. Here is a narrow long spit, the eastern protrusion of which is actually the unfortunate cape. This place is characterized by countless shoals, constant storms, fogs, strong currents. Ships that dared to approach these shores expose themselves to a very real danger - the manifestation of carelessness, frivolity and ignorance of the sailing, almost constantly, leads to tragic consequences.
Bermuda Triangle
Perhaps the most intriguing secret of the Atlantic Ocean is the Bermuda Triangle. Its peaks lie at the southern tip of Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. It is part of the so-called Devil's Belt, of which the Devil's Triangle is also a part, located in the Pacific waters around Miyake Island (Japan).
The excitement around this seemingly unremarkable place arose in the second half of the 20th century. Previously, for hundreds of years, everything seemed to be fine. Ships decorously crossed this ocean space, and the crews on them did not even know what mortal danger they were putting themselves in.
This outrageous frivolity ended in 1950. It was then that a short article by Associated Press correspondent Edward Johnson came out. It was not even an article, but a thin pamphlet published in Florida in a small print run. It had the name "Bermuda Triangle", and the facts stated in it told about the mysterious disappearances of ships and planes in the Bermuda region.
It did not attract public attention in any way, but apparently forced to attract the attention of individual people who feed on sensations and bestseller circulations. However, it took almost 15 years before the light saw the article by Vincent Gladdis entitled "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle." It was published in 1964 in a spiritualistic journal. With a short break, a book by the same author, "Invisible Horizons", was published. In it, a whole chapter was assigned to the mysterious area of the ocean.
A more detailed, solid and capacious work was presented to the readers' judgment ten years later. The author of this bestseller, simply and succinctly titled "The Bermuda Triangle", was Charles Berlitz. It contained a lot of data on the mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft, as well as described incomprehensible phenomena associated with changes in the properties of time and space. Reputable publishers from different countries reprinted this book, and, in a short time, tens of millions of citizens living in different parts of the planet learned about the Bermuda Triangle.
In any business, there are always corrosive skeptics who do not feed them with bread, but let a fly in the ointment spoil a barrel of honey. A blow to such a successfully and dynamically spreading sensation was struck already in the next 1975 by the American journalist Lawrence David Kush. This gentleman left no stone unturned from all the arguments and statements of Charles Berlitz on the pages of his book "The Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle Solved".
To the author's credit, the content of the book is by no means unsubstantiated criticism based on envy of a more successful and nosy colleague, but a serious study based on painstaking study of documents and eyewitness accounts. It was on the basis of factual material that many errors, inaccuracies, and sometimes outright hoaxes were revealed in the work of Charles Berlitz.
The conclusion of the book by Lawrence David Couchet is unambiguous: nothing mysterious, supernatural, inexplicable happens in the Bermuda Triangle. The statistics of tragedies in this section of the Atlantic Ocean correspond to similar data in any other place of the huge reservoir. Mysterious disappearances of material objects are invented, and stories about ships abandoned by crews, about lost time, about instantaneous movement in space for hundreds of kilometers is a myth.
Critics of anomalous phenomena are sober people. To convince them of something, you need to provide iron evidence of this phenomenon. But in everyday life, things are not so simple. What lies beyond the realm cannot be explained in terms of the laws of physics, mechanics or chemistry. Rather, it is human imagination and belief in the mysterious and the unusual that dominate here.
By the way, many paranormal phenomena that take place in the Bermuda Triangle can be interpreted as a direct consequence of the usual banal processes taking place in the waters of the Atlantic. For example, the mysterious disappearance of sea vessels has a simple explanation associated with methane emissions. This gas is released from the gas hydrate deposits on the seabed and saturates the water. The density of the latter drops sharply. A ship hitting such a section of the ocean instantly sinks.
The released methane is not limited to the aquatic environment. It rises into the air and also reduces its density. This can lead to the death of aircraft, which is almost impossible to explain to people on the ground. Do not forget that the gas dissipates very quickly both in water and air. That is, he is a murderer who leaves no trace of himself.
The anomalies over time can be explained by the increased activity of the magnetic field in the area of the Bermuda Triangle. Trapped in a bunch of magnetic forces, aircraft passengers can be convinced of their effect by looking at the hands of a wrist watch that have stopped or slowed down. After some time, the negative factor disappears, the clock starts running normally again, but everyone, without exception, lags behind by the same number of minutes. This gives rise to the false belief that the plane disappeared in another dimension.
If we talk about ships found in the ocean, on which there was not a single crew member, then the blame can be blamed on infrasound that occurs on the water surface under certain conditions. The human brain, heart, other organs of his body - they all have their own vibration frequency. If some of them coincide with the frequency of infrasound, then the resulting resonance can mercilessly hit the psyche of people, plunge them into horror and panic, make them jump overboard and die in the water.
All the presented arguments look quite convincing and realistic. But we must not forget that these are not proofs, but only assumptions. Supporters of the paranormal version can also lay out their vision of the problem to the public, which will be no less convincing and will find many adherents.
Where is the truth? Probably, as always, in the middle. A sober look, combined with a belief in the unusual and supernatural, will be more productive in solving the mysteries of not only the Bermuda Triangle, but also other mysteries of the Atlantic Ocean, of which there are a great many both on its surface and in the dark depths.
Author: ridar-shakin