Feb 17, 2025, 05:23 PM IST
The ocean is vast and still holds many mysteries. Today, we’re going to dive deep and explore 8 of these fascinating ocean mysteries.
In 2011, a group of divers looking for treasure and salvage in the Baltic Sea took a sonar image of a 70-metre-long and steely-looking object lying 300 feet below sea level. Some claimed that ‘The Baltic Sea Anomaly’, as it came to be known, was a UFO, its resemblance to the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars fuelling that speculation.
It sounds like a horror movie monster, but ‘The Bloop’ was actually an ultra-low-frequency, high amplitude underwater sound. Detected by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1997, the sound was loud, unprecedented and eerie.
Measuring up to six metres across and sometimes decorated with shells and coral fragments, these ornate circles were discovered on the seabed near southern Japan in 1995 and remained a mystery for 16 years. As with crop circles on land, alien interference was cited as an explanation.
Years before the discovery of the perplexing circles on its seabed, southern Japan was the site of another ocean mystery. One of the most recent, and most intriguing, was spurred on by the discovery of the atmospheric ‘Yonaguni Monument’ in 1986 by a local Japanese diver.
The narwhal is another puzzling creature form the depths, and the function of its long tusk has been the subject of much debate. Other theories suggest the tusk is a sensory organ able to detect changes in the environment or a weapon for doing battle with other narwhals and predators.
The Mary Celeste has long been a byword for eerie and deserted. That was exactly the scene found by Canadian sailors when they boarded the American vessel off the coast of the Azores in December 1872.
The triangle is an area of 500,000 square miles of ocean between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. The military ship the USS Cyclops, travelling from Baltimore to Brazil with 300 crew, went missing there in 1918. In 1945, a whole squadron of bombers similarly vanished. In both cases no wreckages were found.
Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is below the ocean, but although the ocean has been mapped, only large details (of three miles or more in length) can be properly seen – this means that 95% of our oceans remain hidden. It’s little wonder, then, that the oceans continue to throw up surprises.