News in Science
Is it any easier to get lost at sea in the notorius Bermuda Triangle than anywhere else on then planet? Dr Karl doesn't think so...
By Karl S. Kruszelnicki
When you compare it to the rest of the world, the Bermuda Triangle is big enough, but its reputation is enormous. Geographically speaking, it runs between the Bermuda Islands, Puerto Rico and Miami in Florida. But the myth of the vanishings associated with the Bermuda Triangle is so powerful that books, TV documentaries and even movies have been made about it.
The seeds of the myth began at 2.10 PM, on 5th December, 1945, when a flight of 5 Avenger Torpedo Bombers lifted off from the Naval Base airstrip at Fort Lauderdale in Florida, on a routine bombing training run. The story then goes that in perfectly clear weather, these experienced aviators became mysteriously disorientated, and in a series of increasingly panicked radio transmissions, asked for help. The last radio transmission from Flight 19 was at 7.04 PM. By 7.20 PM a Martin Mariner rescue plane was dispatched - and it too vanished without a trace. By the way, the missing pilots and their missing planes made a brief appearance in the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where it was implied that they had been abducted by aliens.
But the myth claims that it's not just planes that vanish there. Many ships apparently came to foul ends in the Bermuda Triangle, including the 19th century sailing ship, the Marie Celeste, which was supposedly found drifting and abandoned, in perfect sailing condition. And the Bermuda Triangle has moved with the times, and since then, many more ships, including the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion, have vanished there without a trace.
The real story is more prosaic.
First, the Bermuda Triangle is huge - over one million square kilometres, or one fifth the area of Australia ( the contiguous continental USA).
Second, it's just north of the birthplace of most of the Atlantic hurricanes that lash the east coast of the USA. The Gulf Stream, that "river in a sea", flows swiftly and turbulently through the Bermuda Triangle, dumping huge amounts of energy there. Many wild storms can suddenly burst into existence, and can, just as suddenly, fade away.
Third, the undersea landscape is incredibly varied, ranging from shallow continental shelf to the deepest depths of the Atlantic, about 30,000 feet deep. This means that some wrecks would be very difficult to find.
Fourth, it's one of the heaviest-travelled pleasure craft routes in the world, so you would expect to find many nautical mishaps there.
Fifth, a survey by Lloyds of London shows that, on a percentage basis, there are no more ships lost in the Bermuda Triangle, than anywhere else in the world.
When you look at the stories more closely, the myth unravels even more.
The Marie Celeste was found abandoned on the other side of the Atlantic, between Portugal and the Azores. Contrary to legend, its sails were in very poor condition, and it was listing badly - definitely not in near perfect condition. The USS Scorpion was found, sunk, near the Azores, again, a long way from the Bermuda Triangle.
The story of Flight 19 on December 5, 1945, is the key.
The naval aviators were not experienced. They were all trainees, apart from the Commander, a Lt. Charles Taylor. Reports say that he was suffering from a hangover, and tried unsuccessfully to get another commander to fly this mission for him. The weather was not clear - rather, a sudden storm raised 15-metre waves. The Avenger Torpedo Bombers simply ran out of fuel and sank in the storm, after dark, and in high seas. One of Commander Taylor's colleagues wrote, "...they didn't call those planes 'Iron Birds' for nothing. They weighed 14,000 pounds (over 6 tonnes) empty. So when they ditched, they went down pretty fast."
The Martin Mariner rescue plane sent to look for the Avengers did not vanish without trace. These rescue planes were flying fuel tanks, because they had to remain aloft for 24 hours continuously. And prior to this incident, they had a reputation for leaking petrol fumes inside the cabin. The crew of the SS Gaines Mill actually saw this Mariner breaking up in an explosion about 23 seconds after take-off, and saw debris floating in the stormy seas. After this Mariner exploded, the Navy grounded the entire fleet of Mariners.
The myth of the malevolent supernatural powers hiding in the Bermuda Triangle began when Vincent H. Gaddis wrote rather creatively about Flight 19 in the February 1964 issue of Argosy : Magazine of Masterpiece Fiction in a story called, The Spreading Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. But it really took off in 1974, when Charles Berlitz released his best-seller The Bermuda Triangle, an even more imaginative account.
Exotic explanations for these disasters include power crystals from Atlantis, hostile aliens hiding under the waters, violent vortices from other dimensions, and evil humans using anti-gravity machines.
But it turns out that there is something mysterious, and potentially dangerous, and potentially very useful, under the ocean floor of the Bermuda Triangle, and I'll talk about that, next time...
Published 12 March 2004
Bermuda Triangle II
Last time I talked about the myth of the Bermuda Triangle, that triangle of ocean between Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Miami, where ships supposedly vanish for no good reason. But when you look at the statistics, the sinkings are on a par with any other similarly-trafficked area of ocean real estate anywhere else on the planet. The extra sinkings are not real. But there is something very strange lurking under the floor of the Bermuda Triangle - an ice that burns.
In fact, this bizarre ice exists in many other places around the world as well. It's called a "methane hydrate". Basically, it's a single molecule of methane trapped in a cage of six water molecules. Methane has the chemical formula of CH4, which means one atom of carbon is surrounded by four atoms of hydrogen, while water is your standard H2O. If you have methane and water together in the same place, and if the pressure is high enough and the temperature is low enough, you can get a methane hydrate. If you bring a lump of methane hydrate to the surface, the icy water melts releasing the methane, which will burn quite nicely. In one sense, these methane hydrates are kind of like vampires - they will fall to pieces if you bring them out into the light.
These hydrates have been a scientific curiosity for about two centuries. It was only in the late 1960s that Russian scientists discovered natural hydrates in the freezing Siberian permafrost. In the 1970s methane hydrates were discovered at the bottom of The Black Sea. The Black Sea is loaded with these methane hydrates. In fact, sailors have long reported seeing bolts of lightning set fire to the methane on the surface of the sea - methane that had spontaneously bubbled up from below the ocean floor. And since then, they've been found in many many places under the ocean floor, including the notorious Bermuda Triangle.
In fact, there's a huge amount of methane down there. For example, about 330 kilometres off the coast of North Carolina, and three kilometers below the surface of the ocean, is a uprising on the ocean floor called Blake Ridge. This Blake Ridge covers around 100,000 square kilometres of the ocean floor. One quarter of it, just 25,000 square kilometers, holds methane equivalent to around 35 billion tonnes of carbon. In plain English, that deposit of methane would be enough to cover the entire natural gas consumption of the USA for a hundred years. And yet this is just one small area of methane hydrates.
Where did all this methane come from? The answer starts with all the dead bodies of various sea creatures floating down to form a mud on the ocean floor. Strange creatures like bacteria called Archaea, live down there, and eat these dead bodies. If you think that ice-that-burns is weird, these Archaea are even weirder.
Back in the old days, about a quarter-of-a-century ago, the biologists divided life into Five Kingdoms - plants, animals, fungi, protists (single-celled creatures with separate nuclei) and bacteria (single-celled creatures without separate nuclei). But in the late 1970s, Dr. Carl Woese and his colleagues from the University of Illinois started looking at these creatures from the point-of-view of their DNA. They found that some bacteria didn't really belong neatly with the other bacteria. They were small, like regular bacteria, but they had major differences in the DNA, in their cell membranes, and in a whole lot of other areas. These weird bacteria-like creatures often lived in extreme conditions where bacteria could not - temperatures over 100oC, extreme pressure or extreme saltiness. They called these weird bacteria, Archaebacteria, which they later shortened to Archaea. After a while, these scientists realized that all living creatures could be separated into three Domains - the bacteria, the Archaea, and everything else.
It seems that some of these Archaea have been around since the very first days of life on our planet, about 3.8 billion years ago, long before there was any oxygen in the atmosphere.
Some of these Archaea make methane, while others eat it, and sometimes, there's enough methane left over to form these methane hydrates. If these little methane eaters didn't exist, there'd be an extra 300 million tonnes of methane each year bubbling up from the ocean floor. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, about 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and that would set off some pretty significant warming on our little planet. So we're lucky that these methane producers live next to methane eaters.
There seems to be a lot of them around. Some scientists have calculated that the primitive Archaea and other bacteria-like creatures living on the ocean floor make up one third of all the biomass of living creatures on our planet. So in about quarter-of-a-century, these Archaea have gone from completely unknown, to making up one third of the biomass on the planet!
Now sure, a bit of methane bubbling up to the surface can burn in a pretty way if it's hit by lightning - but it can be a lot more dangerous than that, and I'll talk about that, next time...
Published 01 November 2005
© 2014 Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd
Bermuda Triangle 3
This episode of GMIS concludes Karl's wee (but mighty!) series on ye murky deep and dangers that lurk there! Drag at your peril...
By Karl S. Kruszelnicki
Or The Ice That Burns
Last time I talked about bizarre creatures, that were not even discovered a quarter-of-a-century ago, and that make up about one third of all the biomass on the planet. Some of them live in the mud on the ocean floor. These creatures, which look like bacteria, but which are as different from bacteria as we humans are, date back to the ancient time, before there was any oxygen on the planet. They live in a methane-rich environment on the ocean floor, and they both make and eat methane. They even release the methane gas, which then burps its way up to the surface - and when it gets there, this methane gas can be quite dangerous.
Sure, a bit of methane bubbling up to the surface can burn prettily if it's hit by lightning.
But methane in water can be much more dangerous than that. Ships float nicely in water, but if you try to make them float in a mix of water and bubbles, they sink like a set of car keys. There's an area of the ocean called Witch Ground, about 150 kilometres north east of Aberdeen in Scotland. We know that methane bubbles up from time to time, leaving pock marks in the ocean floor. Witchs Hole is a large pock mark on the ocean floor, in Witch's Ground, about 100 metres across. And recently, a trawler has been discovered sitting underwater, perfectly upright, in the middle of this small 100-metre wide methane production hole (or pockmark). It's a steel-built vessel around 25 metres long, built somewhen between 1890 and 1930. We're guessing, but if a large burst of methane bubbles rose up, the trawler would lose all flotation, and just sink, perfectly level, until it bottomed out on the ocean floor.
And if some really large bubbles of methane gas were to rise in the atmosphere and then get sucked into the engines of a jet, they could make a nasty explosion.
This Methane Bubbling Effect, which happens in the Bermuda Triangle, could also explain some of the strange disappearances.
But the Disaster Scenarios get even more extreme than that. Some scientists reckon that about 55.5 million years ago, about one trillion tonnes of methane bubbled to the surface over a very short period, about 1,000 years (that's about 30 tonnes per second), and heated up the planet by about 2°C. Other scientists agree, but crank up the drama by suggesting that a lot of this methane burnt in massive firestorms. Regardless of how extreme this was, it goes under the official name of the Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum.
These deposits of methane hydrates are not cold chunks of ice, making up lifeless deserts, on the ocean floor. Recently, worms around two to five centimeters long have been discovered living happily in the methane hydrates. These pastel pink creepers are flat, segmented worms, with two rows of bristly feet on each side, like oars, which let them move through the canary yellow frozen ice.
These methane hydrates are now the largest untapped source of fossil fuels left here on Earth. But there are a few problems with using them as fuel. First, remember that methane has the chemical formula of CH4 - that's four hydrogen atoms surrounding one carbon atom. When you burn carbon, you get carbon dioxide, and off goes the Greenhouse Effect again. Second, you use up such a huge source of energy without having some flow-on effects, somewhere else in the environment. What they will be, we have no idea.
The methane hydrates stay as solid inert frozen lumps, because of the weight of the ocean above them. But anytime there's an ice age, the ocean height drops by roughly 100 metres. This might then release the pressure on some of the methane hydrates and let the methane bubble to the surface. This would set off a Mini Greenhouse Effect, which would then help reverse the ice age - yet another case of the Earth bringing itself back to its original state, through a negative feedback loop.
At the moment, we're roughly half way through all the easily available and commercially extractable oil. Perhaps these methane hydrates, which are estimated to hold twice as much carbon as all the other fossil energy sources put together, will be the fuel of the 21st Century. Or perhaps we'll be able to do something more sensible than just burn them, and instead, extract the hydrogen to use in fuel cells.
Or maybe a more sensible thing would be to look at the genetic code of these strange methane-producing creatures. They could give us new drugs, or teach us new ways to modify existing chemicals. One thing is certain, this exotic frozen ice, and other secrets of the deep, will have a big influence in the 21st century.
Published 11 November 2005
Physicist Albert Einstein's skepticism about quantum mechanics may lead to ultra-secure Internet, according to a new study. Reuters 
Planck has confirmed the north/south differences and a "cold spot" in the data 
Scientists working at the South Pole have been looking in the sky for an indelible mark left by inflation 
Gravitational waves from inflation put a distinctive twist pattern in the polarisation of the CMB 
Particle physicists are asking similar questions using giant accelerators like the LHC
The measurements were taken using the BICEP2 instrument at the South Pole Telescope facility
"Everything we see today - the galaxies, the stars, the planets - was imprinted at that moment"
