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Scientists Claim To Have Solved the Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle (vice.com)
Slashdot reader MyrddinBach shares a report that claims the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle has been solved. The Bermuda Triangle is a loosely-defined region of water between the southernmost tip of Florida, Puerto Rico, and the island of Bermuda to the north. British oceanographers now believe that "rogue waves" are responsible for the disappearance of a number of ships in the region. VICE News reports: So what are rogue waves? Basically, they're abnormally large and unexpected waves in open sea. Dr Simon Boxall, an Oceanographer from the University of Southampton who led the new study, explained on a Channel 5 documentary The Bermuda Triangle Enigma: "there are storms to the South and North, which come together... we've measured waves in excess of 30 meters. The bigger the boat gets, the more damage is done." His team re-created the intense surges of the 30 meter waves by using indoor simulators. Then to see what such a wave would do to a large ship, they built a model of the USS Cyclops, a carrier that went missing in the Bermuda Triangle in 1918 and claimed the lives of 309 people.
Actually it was a collier, a coal transport cargo ship - there weren't very many carriers around during the Great War.
Well that wasn't very nice
This garbage article isn't news that matters.
It also doesn't make any sense because it was also affecting airplanes.
Someone else already solved it to my satisfaction - it's methane out-gassing. It takes takes very little to stall an airplane engine, the bubbling capsizes boats, and there's a large underground deposit in the area.
Good question. Fortunately, in this case Wikipedia has a citation. We can look at it, and it seems piracy does not have a huge impact. The biggest risk seems to be people using old, rusty ships that are no longer particularly sea-worthy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If they were scientists, they wouldn't be peddling their wares on Channel 5.
Channel 5 is, how shall we say, "a the lower end" of the TV market in the UK. That probably pegs it in the up quartile of US TV, but that's really nothing to boast about. Typical Channel 5 programming includes Big Brother (because none of the other channels want it any more), those 'Building Megastructures' shows that advertise a few building contractors and a bunch of other, really terrible reality TV. Tonight it looks like even that level of quality might be tough to maintain: http://www.channel5.com/tv-gui...
Yes, and it gets more interesting: There were four ships in this class - Proteus, Cyclops, Jupiter, and Nereus. Jupiter was converted into the Navy's first aircraft carrier, USS Langley, and was scuttled eventually . The other three disappeared without a trace at various times. The prevailing theory, as far as I've heard, is that the coal eventually corroded support structures and they were lost in storms at sea. Langley was heavily damaged by the Japanese in February 1942 and scuttled near the Philippines.
12:50 - press return.
During WW1 there were large ships that mounted a short wooden runway and launched aircraft from them. i don't think they were able to land the aircraft at all. I seem to recall some sort of retrieval process that involved landing the planes close to the ships and winch or crane.