Hi, it’s Katrina!
From vanishing ghost islands to strange shark disappearances, here 8 unsolved ocean mysteries.
8.
Disappearance of the Kaz II
On April 15, 2007, a trio of novice sailors departed from the Australian Whitsunday islands
in a newly-purchased yacht called the Kaz II.
The skipper, Des Batten, and two brothers named Peter and John Tunstead, were headed
home to Western Australia and expected the trip to take around two months.
Three days later, the empty vessel was discovered drifting off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
The boat had a ripped sail and the engine was idling.
On a table, there was a half-empty cup of coffee and an open newspaper with some pages
scattered.
There was also a pile of clothing on a bench and several knives strewn about the floor.
The scene was “eerie,” according to rescue officer Corrie Benson, who investigated the
unoccupied catamaran.
It wasn’t outwardly suspicious, however - at least in the opinion of coroner Michael
Barnes, who ruled the following year that the three men had perished as the result of
“an unfortunate series of events.”
According to Barnes’s theory, one of the Tunstead brothers fell overboard while trying
to free a fishing line that had gotten caught on a propeller.
The other brother fell into the water trying to save him.
Amidst the chaos and in an attempt to rescue both men, Barnes believes Batten also fell
overboard.
The coroner’s conclusion is purely circumstantial, as the men’s bodies have never been recovered.
Despite this ‘official’ ruling, some believe their fate was the product of something far
more sinister than an unfortunate tragedy, including the possibility that the men staged
their own disappearances, or fell victim to pirates or even, perhaps, a paranormal force.
What do you think?
Let me know in the comments!
7.
Cannibal Shark
In November 2003, researchers tagged a nine-foot-long female great white shark off the southwestern
Australian coast with the goal of recording her behaviour, ambient temperatures and depth.
According to data, four months later she dove to a depth of roughly 1,900 feet (580 meters),
suggesting she was attacked by something much bigger in the depths of the ocean.
Around that time, the shark’s tag washed ashore 2.5 miles (4 km) away from where it
was originally affixed to the shark, and was found by a beachgoer.
Filmmaker David Riggs, who’d been hired to document the tagging project, believed
something must’ve eaten the shark.
But what?
Some experts think that the massive shark may have come across an even bigger shark.
Camrin Braun, a former doctoral student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in
Massachusetts told National Geographic that cannibalism in sharks is quite common in both
juveniles and adults.
However, based on the tag’s ambient temperature reading from around the time the shark went
missing, Braun said that sharks aren’t usually found in waters with this temperature.
Her fate likely had more to do with her crossing paths with a killer whale - the only species
known to be able to take on the great white, other than the great white itself.
The strange thing is, killer whales usually only dive to around 100 meters.
The deepest dive for a killer whale under forced experimental conditions was 259 meters.
Remember that this shark, was found to have disappeared around 580 meters.
To this day, nobody knows exactly what may have eaten one of the most fearsome predators
in the sea.
6.
1968 Submarine Disappearances
In 1968, four naval submarines mysteriously vanished.
It was the deadliest post-World War II year for submariners.
The disappearances occurred in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
In total, 318 sailors from Israel, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States were
never seen again and were presumed to have entered eternal rest at sea.
The first vessel to go missing was a diesel-electric Israeli submarine called the Dakar.
She never arrived in Israel as planned on February 2nd of that year, and communications
with the sub had ceased on January 24th.
Despite a multi-nation search effort, the Dakar was nowhere to be found.
The lost sub was found on the seabed between Crete and Cyprus in 1999, but nobody knows
why she went down.
Two days after the Dakar disappeared, Minerve, another diesel-electric submarine, went missing.
The French vessel was just 30 miles away from its base when all contact stopped.
Its remains, including a 52-man crew, were never found.
In March, the Soviet K-129 ballistic missile submarine went unresponsive after seven years
in service while on a combat patrol in the Pacific Ocean.
The sub and its 98-man crew were declared lost after a weeks-long search.
What the Soviet Union considered a loss, the CIA saw as an opportunity to gain access to
top-secret codebooks and encryption gear.
The K-129’s location was pinpointed, but while the vessel was being salvaged, it broke
in two, taking its most valuable information to its watery grave.
The last to go missing was a US attack submarine called the Scorpion.
It disappeared during a classified mission in May and was found by the US Navy five months
later on the ocean floor of the Azores, with its entire crew lost.
To this day, the causes behind the four 1968 submarine losses remain unclear, puzzling
naval engineers, researchers, and historians alike.
It is most likely that the Cold War escalated, and most of the skirmishes happened in the
sea.
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5.
Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle is a roughly 500,000-square-mile parcel of ocean between Bermuda, the Greater
Antilles, and the Atlantic coast of the Florida panhandle.
It’s infamous for its unexplainable disappearances over the years, including over 50 ships and
at least 20 airplanes.
Reports of the disappearances date back to the mid-19th century, with some ships transmitting
distress signals only to never be seen or heard from again, and others that were discovered
completely empty - seemingly abandoned.
Similarly, airplanes have vanished with no evidence of wreckages ever being found.
There are numerous theories regarding what goes in within the Bermuda Triangle, many
of them supernatural.
However, these disappearances may have been caused by geophysical and environmental factors,
including navigational errors due to the failure of pilots to account for something called
the agonic line - a place where there’s no need to compensate for magnetic compass
variation.
Rogue waves, which can reach up to 100 feet in height, may have also been responsible
for some of the disappearances.
This theory is especially plausible because due to its location, the Bermuda Triangle
is a prime area for storms from multiple directions to converge, increasing the likelihood of
rogue waves.
It also seems that all the disappearances happened within a certain time period, indicating
that whatever the conditions might have been causing the disappearances have stopped.
Some have written off the Bermuda Triangle’s bizarre occurrences as mythical or exaggerated.
After all, despite the disappearances, thousands of ships and airplanes have traversed the
Triangle without incident for decades and continue to do so.
There’s also no evidence that disappearances in this region outnumber those of any other
heavily-traveled waterway, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
What’s your theory about what happened in the Bermuda Triangle?
Let me know in the comments!
4.
The Phantom Island of Bermeja
To the northwest of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico lies an island - well,
not anymore, actually.
The uninhabited island is - or was - known as Bermeja and it first appeared on a Portuguese
map in 1535.
Maps drawn by Spanish explorers during the 16th and 17th centuries commonly featured
Bermeja, with just slight variations in its location and name, which was to be expected
back then.
Throughout the 18th century, Bermeja’s cartographic appearance decreased, and eventually, the
island became entirely absent from maps.
The 1921 edition of the Geographic Atlas of the Mexican Republic contains the last-known
mapped appearance of Bermeja.
There are multiple circulating theories about Bermeja’s fate, including rising sea levels
caused by global warming, a catastrophic earthquake, and destruction at the hands of the CIA.
The Mexican government commissioned an expedition to find Bermeja in 1997 amidst negotiations
between Mexico and the US to delineate a boundary in a stretch of international waters known
as Hoyos de Dona, where Bermeja once allegedly existed.
However, the search was fruitless.
In 2009, renewed search efforts using up-to-date technology once again failed to turn up the
island.
One theory posits the possibility that Bermeja never existed and was simply a fixture used
by cartographers to mislead their rivals.
Creating maps with deliberate inaccuracies was a somewhat common practice among early
explorers according to Julio Zamora, president of the Mexican Society of Geography.
On the other hand, to some, the detailed descriptions of Bermeja in historical documents point toward
the island having existed at one time.
In the opinion of Irasema Alcántara from the Autonomous University of Mexico, there’s
too much written evidence to deny Bermeja existed, but it must’ve been located somewhere
else.
3.
Milky Sea Phenomenon
While most ocean mysteries of the past, such as the existence of monsters, have long-since
been debunked by the scientific community, one strange marvel still exists, but is yet
to be explained.
It’s called the milky sea phenomenon.
The spectacle was first mentioned by author Jules Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
It wasn’t recorded in modern logs until 1995, when the British merchant vessel the
SS Lima made note of it while sailing in the Indian Ocean.
The captain and crew described the effect as glowing water that “appeared to cover
the entire sea area, from horizon to horizon”- a distance they knew would take the ship six
hours to cross from one edge to the other, so they knew it was a pretty large area.
In 2005, a team led by Naval Research Laboratory scientist Steven Miller produced the first-ever
images of the 5,780-square-mile glowing region.
Miller admitted in an interview with LiveScience that the causes of the milky sea phenomenon
are unknown.
The prevailing theory holds that the eerie glow is caused by a massive formation of bioluminescent
bacteria.
Theoretically, as long as the bacteria have an ample food source, this is entirely possible.
Scientists are still trying to get to the bottom of the mystery.
2.
Blobus Purplus
In 2016, scientists from Ocean Exploration Trust aboard the research ship E/V Nautilus
discovered an enigmatic purple blob on the ocean floor near the Channel Island National
Marine Sanctuary off California, deep in the Arguello Canyon.
They recovered the specimen using a remotely operated vehicle and once they brought it
up, everyone on board was confused.
The small purple blob was jokingly nicknamed Blobus purplus after a vintage Saturday Night
Live skit, and the good-natured crew quipped about it possibly being a “tiny momma octopus”
or a spider egg sac.
Upon further examination, the researchers concluded that the strange object was likely
a previously unknown species of soft sea slug known as a pleurobranch.
It’s related to the snail but does not have a shell and is simply composed of skin, muscle,
and organs.
Research has yet to confirm their suspicions.
1.
“Bloop” Sound
In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded an extremely loud,
ultralow-frequency, never-before-heard sound in the South Pacific.
If you don't remember, here it is.
It had a unique pattern and did not display known characteristics of geological phenomena,
such as earthquakes or volcanic activity, or man-made noises, such as submarines or
drilling, leading some to believe that the noise was made by an undiscovered marine animal.
The sound had traveled thousands of miles between autonomous hydrophone listening stations
situated deep in the Pacific, meaning if it was the product of a living creature, it would
be one of epic proportions - much larger than any species currently known to man.
Scientists announced in 2005 that the “bloop” sound was caused by an icequake, which is
when icebergs break off of glaciers, and that the event occurred in Antarctica.
Most scholars and researchers have accepted this theory.
As usual, however, conspiracy theorists aren’t satisfied by this logical and most-likely
explanation.
They’re quick to point out that the Bloop’s sound signature doesn’t exactly match that
of an icequake and contains unexplained anomalies.
The sound most people have heard has been edited and changed, and that scientists have
yet to definitely prove that the sound was caused by an icequake.
In their defense, one NOAA scientists has reportedly redacted his opinion regarding
the alleged icequake source of the Bloop, and believes the sound was actually made by
an animal.
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