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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.
that's what *they* want us to believe
"The number of ships and aircraft reported missing in the area was not significantly greater, proportionally speaking, than in any other part of the ocean."
and
"In a 2013 study, the World Wide Fund for Nature identified the world's 10 most dangerous waters for shipping, but the Bermuda Triangle was not among them."
Instead this looks like an advertisement for Channel 5's latest TV show. I won't be watching it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Things melt in the Bermuda Triangle. It's always exactly 180 degrees in the triangle.
rewriting history since 2109
Rogue waves were big news a couple decades ago. They are nasty - basically breakers in the middle of nowhere, so do require the right conditions to form. Like a tornado requires the right conditions.
Maybe they've demonstrated that the right conditions do regularly occur in that area.
Actually the theory is that methane from methane hydrate from the ground and/or fresh water "sinkholes" cause the trouble. ... ...
OTOH there was no plane loss since roughly 1955
No idea if ships/planes avoid the area
Nevertheless the old stories are interesting reads, as many pilots, regardless of ship or plane, made super stupid mistakes.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This garbage article isn't news that matters.
The "rogue vawes" are gonna saw those boats in half. I bete the 309 people would still be alive if they had some Flex-Tape.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
...The bigger the boat gets, the more damage is done...
***Cringe*** A boat is a small to medium size vessel that stops being a boat and becomes a ship at a displacement of about 500 tons, larger than that and it's a ship. As a rule of thumb a ship can carry a boat, a boat cannot carry a ship and this does not count, a destroyer is a 'warship' not a 'warboat'. In fact some modern destroyers should probably be re-classified as light cruisers so the are most definitely not 'boats'. In the Navy they also apply the word "boat" to very large submersibles and even then only for reasons having to do with naval tradition. So please stop pointing at a huge half kilometre long oil tanker or an aircraft carrier with a crew of several thousand and several squadrons of aircraft on board and calling it a big boat, they are both really, really huge ships.
Years ago it was supposed to be rogue aliens or rogue pirates, now it‘s rogue waves.
Rogue waves are more interesting than the original article.
In deep water rogue waves fall into two categories. There are areas in the ocean where two currents meet, for example along the east coast of Southern Africa. This can result in increased incidence of rogue waves in those areas. These are quite well known to mariners. But the others are what are sometimes called "Schrodinger waves".
Historically, mathematicians have treated ocean as classical waves with a normal distribution of wave heights because that was a very good match to what was observed. But when you apply the Schrodinger wave equation it predicts a low probability of extremely large waves which appear from nowhere and vanish equally quickly. The probability of these events is extremely small, but there are a large number of ships spending very long times on the open ocean. Consequently, there will be a small number of ships which encounter waves many times larger than the average wave height and sink without warning.
The final class of rogue wave is a 'soliton' wave. These have been generated by ships travelling at a high speed in moderate depths (30-40m) of water. The wave picks up energy from the wake but is almost invisible in deep water. Because it is a soliton the wave packet continues to propagate with little loss of energy instead of dissipating quickly like a normal wake. If the wave hits a beach, a rogue wave appears and sweep sunbathers into the sea.
Much more mathematically interesting than you might think.
I remember hearing about a statistical study some years ago that found that shipping losses in the area were proportional to the amount of shipping in the area. A lot more boats go through that area than most other parts of the ocean.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Can there be rogue gravity waves in the universe that are much stronger than the gravity waves that one would expect? Or don't gravity waves reinforce that way. If they do exist, how would they show? What effects would they have? And how would we (humanity) go about finding them? A rogue wave passing through might disturb the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud and send objects speeding toward the Sun...and us. Did that happen 66 million years ago? Did a rogue wave destroy the dinosaurs?
E Proelio Veritas.
Rogue waves are more interesting than the original article.
In deep water rogue waves fall into two categories. There are areas in the ocean where two currents meet, for example along the east coast of Southern Africa. This can result in increased incidence of rogue waves in those areas. These are quite well known to mariners. But the others are what are sometimes called "Schrodinger waves".
With Schrodinger waves it is always the death of the ships cat that causes the sinking, at least in the Bermuda triangle.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Actually the Bermuda triangle has the Gulf stream running throught it, which is sometimes in opposiition to the prevailing winds. This tends to create more rogue waves. It also shears the waves, so that they are more of a square shape, which batters ships and smaller boats.
The real answer to the 'mystery' is that there is no fucking mystery, ships and planes do not go missing any more often in that region than anywhere else. Nothing to investigate. Yawn.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
> A boat is a small to medium size vessel that stops being a boat and becomes a ship
A boat becomes a ship, like a puppy becomes a dog and a kitten becomes a cat? That's really cool; I didn't know that.
The russians would be speaking german right about now if it wasn't for all the help sent from the americans. Bad luck on their part I guess.
Indeed, there are more unexplained losses per square mile in the Great Lakes than the Bermuda Triangle, but I've yet to see the book on the Great Lakes Triangle.
There was a book that went into all of this in excruciating detail. All the author did was go and get the official reports of the various "mysterious" losses. In many cases, there was no loss in the first place. For instance, one ship that was claimed to have disappeared forever was actually working the east coast of Africa and never ventured into the triangle in its entire life. The various triangle proponents would simply copy each other's lists, add a few of their own, and never bother to actually check any of them.
Even the more famous examples, like Flight 19, are explained in depth if one simply goes and looks. The Wiki article is a great place to start.
I thought we already knew this. I recall watching a documentary maybe 10 years ago that said this is the most likely explanation for these disappearances.
Also, the fact that it's over open water explains a number of small airplanes going down in the area.
That is genuine mystery. How did a song like that become a massive hit. It defies all reason.
Another Douche-Bag claims to have an explanation for a phenomenon which does not exist! Phlegm at 11!
Wave theory now suggests Bermuda Triangle is a cemetery where nothing can survive the physics of its waves - sure.
Furious and Glorious were converted from "Large Light Cruisers" into carriers during WWI
Eventually they ended up with a full length flight deck
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Between Vice and Slashdot, do you expect even the a cursory review for facts?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Do rogue waves bring down airplanes as well?
If this theory of rogue waves is true, then there should be numerous "Bermuda Triangles" scattered around the world, where storms congregate.
And indeed there are. There is folk lore of sea creatures and mysterious gods that swallow up ships all over the planet from the Sea of Japan to the Straits of Gibraltar. The only mystery that is still baffling as hell about the Bermuda triangle is the squadron of 5 avengers that have yet to be found on the sea bottom. That one can only be explained by really bad navigation and rookie pilots not telling their squadron leader that they were way the hell of course and heading for an ocean ditch situation out of radio range in the middle of no where after sunset. Like many otherwise good Americans they were all ready to follow their leader even if the guy was completely and absolutely wrong.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
If you doubt it, check out Lawrence Kusche's masterpiece:
https://www.amazon.com/Bermuda...
He did what none of the writers of the other Bermuda Triangle books ever bothered to do: He went back to the original news items and historical accounts of what was going on at the time of each of the "disappearance". Lloyd's Registry of Shipping. Weather reports. Original newspaper stories. Later newspaper articles after the first ones.
Each chapter starts out with "The Story As It Is Usually Told", then compares it with contemporary information, and results of investigations at the time.
Contrary to the myth, it was not a clear, sunny day, it was in the middle of Hurricane Iona.
The Marine Sulfur Queen was a horrific death trap, the real mystery is that it stayed afloat as long as it did. (Molten sulfur tank penetrating all previously watertight bulkheads; the tank leaked, and there were constant sulfur fires between the tank and the ship's hull.)
Some ships were just delayed; next week's newspaper reports it arriving in port unscathed.
Some stories, there's no record of the ship ever existing, so there's nothing to check.
Etc. The book is definitely worth checking out.
Ok, maybe this explains ships disappearing in the triangle.....
How do big waves explain the disappearance of aircraft??
They don't.
But if you read down toward the end of TFA, you find that the Triange has a LOT of aircraft traffic, including a lot flown by inexperienced pilots, and Lloyds of London says that, by their stats, the percentage that go down in the Triangle is just what it is elsewhere.
An old saw says you can do any maneuver you want in an airplane, as long as you don't do it close to the ground. It probably applies about the same if you substitute "over water".
= = = =
A number of years ago my wife bought a sailboat from Hake Yachts, which was located in Florida. Hake is a great marine architect and makes sturdy ocean-capable small craft. (It has been said his products have enough epoxy/fiberglass in the hull to make TWO boats of a more typical design.)
One of the interesting features of our model is a fold-up table in the cabin. Cast onto the bottom in clear plastic (so it's easily visible when the table is up) is a marine chart of the Florida keys. (If he'd known we'd be sailing in the SF Bay area he'd have substituted one for the Golden Gate / Farallon Islands.) His larger models have a chart of the Florida-Bermuda-Bahamas area.
Why? Because he had a lot of customers who, newbies to sailing, would get their new boat, launch it, and immediately set out for Bermuda or the Bahamas, using no chart or a Florida road map. B-b Losing your customers at sea, even if it's totally their fault, is bad for your products' reputation. So this feature insures that they have at least ONE chart of the likely area.
The ocean around Florida is really dangerous if you get lost. If you're East and lose power, the Gulf Stream will take you to Britain - in a few months. Or other currents will take you to the Sargasso Sea - a downwelling - and getting to land from there without power or sail will take forever (or until continental drift rearranges the currents). Go too far south, then head west to pick up the Florida coast, and you'll go into the Gulf of Mexico, where you can sail West for a long time and eventually reach Texas, Mexico, or the Isthmus of Panama. You can fix that by turning North, IF you know you're West of Florida. But if you're wrong and you're East, you can cruise North through the Pacific until you reach Greenland, Iceland, or the polar ice cap.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Must have been some mighty tall waves to explain the missing aircraft....
In North Sea on an offshore rig at elevation about 180 feet (say 30 fathoms high, 60 metres approx) wave crashed into and over the rig. Yes a rough wave, unusual but actually recorded due to rig height!. This is one of a number of 'extreme wave heights'.
Link: Paid Paper.
http://offshoremechanics.asmed...
Free but 'averaged' data (mean heights)
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary....
Regards Eion MacDonald