"Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth" - Alfred Lord Tennyson
That’s right.
It’s time to release the kraken!
This is the legendary sea monster.
It’s massive,
terrifying,
and hungry.
Thankfully, it’s just a myth…
right?
What if this behemoth of the sea
actually existed?
It's time to dive in.
We're getting up close and personal
with the mythical cephalopod feared by
ocean dwellers and land lovers alike,
The Kraken!
First, we would categorize the kraken
as a cephalopod.
Like the octopus, squid and cuttlefish,
the kraken would be a highly advanced
and intelligent marine animal.
Cephalopods are soft-bodied,
so they have no bones to become fossils.
This would explain why we haven’t found any
remains of a kraken,
but it also proposes a terrifying possibility.
If the kraken lived by the laws of science,
it wouldn't immortal.
Which means there’s more than one,
and they’re breeding.
Baby krakens!
As to where this is happening,
we assume it would remain
in the North Atlantic Ocean.
That being said,
the species of giant squids alive today
inhabit all of the world’s oceans.
So we shouldn’t consider ourselves
to be safe yet.
Your first hint that you may be
in the presence of a kraken
is that you catch lots of fish.
And I mean, A LOT of fish.
If it seems too good to be true,
that's because it is.
The kraken is scaring the fish
towards the surface.
And that's a harbinger of death
for unwary sailors.
Giant squids hunt by
keeping still in deep waters.
When a fish gets close enough
to the dangling tentacles,
it’s pulled into the squid's grasp,
and is unable to escape the suction cups
that line the tentacles.
We can assume the kraken
hunts in a similar style,
but fish isn’t on its menu.
It wants you,
your crew and your ship.
The Kraken is described in folklore
as being about the size of a few small islands,
and its back was 1,500 meters (4,921 feet) in circumference.
It’s also said that the kraken
was able to pull massive ships
completely underwater with its tentacles.
How strong would it have to be to pull this off?
Well, Archimedes' principle states that
the buoyant force on an object,
submerged in a fluid,
equals the weight of the fluid
that the object displaces.
If you take the gross tonnage of your ship,
and multiply it by the density
of seawater and gravity,
then subtract the weight of the ship,
it will give you the force that the kraken needs
to use to pull your ship under the water.
For the kraken to pull a regular-sized ship
completely underwater,
it would need to exert a force
of just over 400,000 kg (900,000 lbs).
In non-mathematical terms,
the kraken is very, very strong.
And you?
Well, I'm sorry to break this to you.
But you’re kraken food.
It’s safe to say that if at least one
of these monsters dwelled beneath the ocean,
anything involving sea travel
would have happened very,
very differently.
Well, if this monster of the deep
is lurking in the Atlantic,
it would have changed history as we know it.
The Vikings wouldn’t have been able
to sail overseas
if this sea monster was eating them.
Come to think of it,
Christopher Columbus and his crew may have
ended up in a watery grave,
and never made it to the New World.
In fact, North America might not have been
discovered at all
until the invention of air travel.
Now, we could assume that explorers
evaded the kraken on their voyage.
But with the kraken
being such a massive creature,
it would need a lot of food to sustain itself.
Meaning, it doesn’t look good for anyone
who likes to go into the water.
Thankfully, the kraken isn’t currently
devastating the ocean today.
If it ever existed in the first place,
it would have been gone long before
humans made their debut.
The myths and legends
attributed to the kraken
are more than likely encounters
with their very real,
and arguably very terrifying,
giant squid cousins.
But after all that,
we can’t write the old kraken off for sure.
Human beings have only searched
5% of the oceans.
Everything else down there is a mystery.
It may be a creature of myth,
but we can’t imagine it would be fun
to be eaten by a kraken,
What if another, real nautical creature
decided to make you it’s dinner?
What if you were swallowed by a whale?