For several centuries, inexplicable phenomena periodically occur in different oceans of our planet - giant rotating circles appear on the surface of the water, illuminated from the ocean depths. Asian sailors gave them the name - "wheels of Buddha", and European sailors - "devil's carousel". What is this? Scientists still cannot answer.
The imagination of people has long been struck by the majestic spectacle of the sparkling, like a burning sea. The ancient Greek scientist Aristotle and the Roman writer and scientist Pliny wrote about him. For centuries, sailors from different countries have noted in their logs the moments of encounters with this mysterious phenomenon.
The world first learned about such a phenomenon in the spring of 1879. The British warship Hawk was sailing the waters of the Persian Gulf on April 13 when the sailors noticed two huge glowing circles rotating in different directions at a speed of over 130 km / h. The captain of the vessel Evans reported this to the Admiralty, but no one took the message seriously.
A similar spectacle was observed in subsequent years by sailors and other ships. It was determined that the radius of the glowing "wheel" varied from 300 to 600 meters.
In particular, the famous English naturalist Charles Darwin, in his famous Voyage on the Beagle, described it as follows: “Once, on a very dark night, when we sailed a little south of La Plata, the sea was an amazing and beautiful sight. A fresh breeze was blowing, and the entire surface of the sea, which had been covered with foam during the day, was now glowing with a faint light. The ship drove waves in front of it like liquid phosphorus, and milky light stretched in the wake. As far as the eye could see, the crest of each wave was shining, and the horizon near the horizon, reflecting the sparkling of these bluish lights, was not as dark as the sky above.
In 1902, in the Gulf of Guinea, the Fort Salisbury sailed in circles on the water; not far from their ship, the sailors saw some kind of structure with glowing lights. Noticing the approach of the ship, the strange object went under the water. Moreover, all the crew members felt as if the rays were shining through absolutely everything.
In the spring of 1962, the sailors of the Telemachus saw how the light rays began to decrease in diameter, their speed of rotation also decreased, and soon they disappeared under water.
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And in 1967, in the Gulf of Thailand, from the Tlenfall Loch vessel, they noticed a fifty-meter object on the surface of the water, from which rays were coming several kilometers long.
The echo sounder of the Russian research ship "Vladimir Vorobyov" in the Bay of Bengal recorded at a depth of 20 meters, under the ship, a massive object emitting rays (the depth of the ocean in this place was about 200 m). After half an hour, everything suddenly disappeared. Interestingly, all the crew members felt panicky; even the sleeping sailors who saw nothing felt an unreasonable horror and pressure on their ears (although no one heard any sound). The ship's personnel took water samples - there was not even a trace of glowing plankton in it …
Here are some examples of encounters with the "glowing wheels" of Russian sailors. On August 22-23, 1908, in the Sea of Okhotsk, the crew of the Russian steamer "Okhotsk" observed a very incomprehensible "behavior" of the sea. The naval doctor FD Derbek recalls that suddenly, at 11 o'clock at night, an unusually bright greenish-white light flashed on the water under the stern, which quickly covered a large surface of the water. This brightly lit surface, which eventually took the shape of an oval with a ship in the center, moved forward with it for some time, and then gradually separated from it and floated to the side on its own. A sharply outlined luminous spot was removed very quickly from the vessel and reached the horizon in 2-3 minutes.
In 1973, Soviet sailors of the motor ship "Anton Makarenko" watched a wonderful performance with the figured glow of the sea in the Strait of Malacca. Eyewitnesses say that light spots on the surface of the water either stretched out into stripes or joined together, forming a circle rotating counterclockwise. After 40-50 minutes, everything suddenly disappeared.
In 1977, the crew of the Soviet scientific vessel "Vladimir Vorobyov" carried out oceanographic research in the Bay of Bengal. Suddenly, the team noticed that a bright white spot rotated counterclockwise around the vessel within a radius of 150-200 meters. Then it split into eight curved rays. In half an hour, the diameter of the "wheel" decreased to 100 meters, and gradually it disappeared. The temperature of the water overboard was measured. It was + 26 ° С, no traces of the accumulation of glowing plankton were found. Of interest is the fact that as soon as a mysterious glow appeared on the water, the sleeping sailors woke up from an inexplicable sense of anxiety.
In the summer of 1978, the sailors of the Novokuznetsk ship in Guaya-Kil Bay saw four twenty-meter glowing lines in front of the ship's bow and two lines near the starboard side. What happened next shocked everyone: right in front of the ship, a flattened white object, the size of a large watermelon, emerged from the water at high speed, flew around the ship from all sides and plunged into the water again.
The crew members of the Soviet ship "Professor Pavlenko" in June 1984 in the Neretvan Bay even took pictures of a similar phenomenon. They saw a luminous spot in the depths of the waters, from which there were clearly outlined rings. The speed of their movement was over 100 m / min.
In Sevastopol, oceanologists told the optical physicist A. Kuzovkin about a unique case. Working in a bathyscaphe underwater, they saw a giant wheel-shaped object with a diameter of 10-storey building. The wheel, rotating, took a horizontal position and began to move away. The object's rotation speed reached several tens of revolutions per minute.
The speed of movement of the "luminous wheels" and the ability of their rays to penetrate the water column, and sometimes the hulls of ships, remains a big mystery for scientists. But experience has shown that the glow of the sea rarely occurs independently. As a rule, it is excited by some external cause. It can be the arrival of a tsunami, excitement or storm, the impact of the surf on the shore. There is often a beautiful trail of light left by passing ships.
More than two thousand reports on the "figured" glow of the sea over 60 years have been analyzed by Professor of Oceanography at the University of Hamburg Kurt Kalle. He hypothesized that the reason is the flashing at the surface of the sea of the smallest organisms disturbed by shock waves. All this is associated with seismic activity at the bottom of the seas and oceans.
The glow of the sea is observed everywhere - with the exception of highly desalinated waters. Especially often such pictures occur in tropical and temperate regions - the Gulfs of Aden and Biscay, in the waters off the coast of India and North Africa. The impression is that in the tropics the night sea sometimes blazes, shimmers with all the colors of paints. Travelers are amazed by the whimsical and vibrant lighting effects. The pictures of the figured glow are especially beautiful, when various geometric shapes appear on the water, rapidly replacing each other - from straight and curved lines to circles and balls rotating in different directions.
The mysterious glow of the sea sometimes covers areas up to hundreds of square kilometers. Moreover, the phenomenon has no final explanation.
In particular, biologists' references to the glow of marine organisms do not exhaust all aspects of the observed phenomena.
To date, there are about a hundred reports of mysterious circles, confirmed by photographs and readings of on-board instruments. In all cases, their glow is so bright that you can read.
Scientists put forward many hypotheses, but none of them could explain these anomalous phenomena.
Some believe that these are luminous marine organisms rise from the bottom, but they cannot move so clearly and rectilinearly and reach speeds of more than 150 km / h. Academician A. N. Krylov explained these phenomena by optical processes on the surface of water and in the air, and called them "the ghost of the ocean". Other scientists are trying to attribute this to various underwater civilizations, while others - to aliens from outer space. The fourth explain the occurrence of circles by the eruption of underwater volcanoes. Allegedly, volcanic emissions come into contact with ocean water - and a luminous cloud is obtained. But why such clear circles? And how to explain the fact that the glow was observed where there are no underwater volcanoes?
In turn, ocean scientists have expressed many other hypotheses about the origin of such peculiar light effects in the ocean.
So, one of the explanations of a purely hydrophysical nature is based on the fact that vortex formations appear and develop in the water column of the oceans and seas, which can have a fairly high speed. It is they that excite the luminescence of planktonic organisms capable of luminescence.
Another hypothesis associates the glow with the displacement of rocks at the bottom of the seas and oceans. But the existing attempts to connect the glow of the sea with disturbances of the Earth's magnetic field and with seismic activity in its depths are also not always confirmed.
For the first time, the nature of the glow of the sea was solved by the Russian navigator, Admiral Ivan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern (1770-1846). He headed the first Russian round-the-world expedition in 1803-1806 on the ships "Nadezhda" and "Neva" and compiled the "Atlas of the South Sea". He suggested that the glow of the sea is caused by tiny organisms living in the water. As further studies showed, I. F. Kruzenshtern was right.
It was later found that many marine organisms have the ability to emit light. The ability to glow has been noted in representatives of many thousands of species of animals and plants. These include some fish, including sharks, cephalopods (in particular, squid), jellyfish, crustaceans, protozoa and, of course, algae. Some organisms glow so brightly that several crustaceans placed in a jar emit so much light that a person can read a newspaper. The glow serves to protect against predators, either to lure prey or to attract individuals of the opposite sex.
However, the main and main source of the sea glow is dinoflagellates - unicellular organisms with the properties of both plants and animals. Certain types of dinoflagellates contain chlorophyll (they are classified as plants), while others do not have it, and they are classified as part of the animal kingdom. In addition, many of them have so-called "tails", "flagella", which give them some freedom of movement.
Among dinoflagellates, peridineas are the most numerous. This is a large group of planktonic organisms (from the Greek "planktos" - soaring in the water column); most of the species live in warm seas and oceans.
Most peridinia have the ability to emit light, especially when worried. However, they are famous not only for this. They belong to flagellates. Scientists divide them into two groups - plant and animal. In many cases, the boundary between animal and plant peridineas is indistinguishable. This is due to the fact that some of them are typical plants, capable of creating organic matter from carbon dioxide and mineral salts in the light. Others, like animals, consume ready-made organic compounds. Organic compounds dissolved in water are absorbed through the cell walls, and shaped particles through a special opening (the so-called "mouth"). There is also a third group of organisms that combines the properties of algae and animals; in the light, they, like plants, create organic matter,and in the dark (at great depths where sunlight does not penetrate) they feed on ready-made organic matter.
Most people are not even aware of the existence of peridinia, they are so small. Their size does not exceed hundredths of a millimeter. Meanwhile, together with other algae, they produce 30-40% of all organic substances created on Earth. In the seas and fresh water bodies, there are sometimes so many of them that the water becomes brown. Their concentration can reach 100 thousand organisms in 1 milliliter of water. This phenomenon is called plankton bloom. For example, the name of the Red Sea is also associated with the development of microscopic algae that give the water the appropriate color. True, these algae belong to a completely different group - blue-green.
Peridineas can be of various shapes: some of them are spherical, others are equipped with long horn-shaped outgrowths. These outgrowths protect them from being devoured by animals, and at the same time help them to float in the water column.
What is the role of these algae in the seas and oceans? Tiny algae are the main food of the ocean inhabitants. On land, plant communities provide food for all terrestrial herbivores. In the seas and oceans, microscopic algae serve as a food source for a myriad of small animals, mainly crustaceans, that feed on them. In turn, these planktonic animals are eaten by larger organisms, those by fish, and so on, until humans complete the food chain of those who eat and are eaten.
It should be noted that some peridineas are toxic. Their massive development sometimes leads to the poisoning and death of fish and seabirds. This phenomenon is called "red tide".
The second most important organism that causes the glow of the sea is the flagellate noctiluca (aka night light). Nocturnal is a single-celled protozoan and it belongs to armored flagellates. Her body is spherical, about 2-3 mm in size with a mobile contractible shell. It reproduces mainly by dividing in two. The content of the cell is filled with fatty inclusions, which, upon mechanical and chemical stimulation, are oxidized and begin to glow. Noktiluka forms accumulations in the surface layers of warm waters, where it feeds on algae, bacteria, and protozoa.
The night light begins to glow from any irritation, scaring off prospective enemies with flashes, in particular the crustaceans that feed on it. The nightlight has two flagella, with one it drives food to the mouth, and the other serves as a motor. With its help, she moves in the water column.
So, thanks to the legend, we got acquainted with amazing creatures - possessing the properties of plants and animals, and also capable of glowing from the slightest touch.