The world around us is filled with a variety of wonders. Some magnificently beautiful, some awe inspiring, some mysterious, all these expressions can be used to describe natural as well as man made edifices. Apart from that which can be seen and admired there are many unexplained mysteries.
One such is the mystery or the myth of the Bermuda Triangle.
The Bermuda Triangle also known as the Devil’s Triangle is a loosely defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean. The rough location of the triangle’s three vertices are Miami in the United States, Puerto Rico, a island nation between the two Americas, and Bermuda, also an island nation in the Atlantic Ocean. This works out to a very large area of the ocean. Within the confines of this area a number of ships and aircraft are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Various theories abound on the causes of these disappearances but none of them have ever been categorically able to explain in the true sense exactly what could have caused these events. The mystery was further compounded by the fact that there were no survivors ever found nor any debris from the crafts that went into oblivion.
Naturally when such things happen various people come up with reasoned explanations, some bordering on the incredible, to try and explain the phenomenon. There has been paranormal explanations that used supernatural concepts to explain the events. Some have speculated that it could be the result of ‘left-over’ technology from the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. Other writers have even gone to the extent of attributing the happenings to “UFOs”. Authors of various books have listed theories that attribute the losses in the Triangle to anomalous or unexplained forces.
There have also been some natural explanations one being that the losses may have been due to compass variations. For those not familiar, planes and ships depend on the magnetic compass to show them the direction in which they must go to reach their destination. With the absence of any landmark the compass is the only aid to navigation. The compass works on the principle of a magnet that points to the the “true” North and the rest of the dial is calibrated with this one reference point. The earth is said to have a magnetic centre in the north and south poles and the “lodestone” or natural magnet is attracted to these poles and is the basis of the compass dial.
Coming to the Triangle. One natural explanation is that this area has an unusual local magnetic anomaly which throws off the vessel’s compass, due to which the disappearing ships and planes could have lost their way. This theory was very strongly believed and ships passing through that area were always vigilant to check any unusual activity on their compasses. But compasses have natural magnetic variations in relation to magnetic poles, a fact that navigators have known for centuries. All the same when transiting this area there was always anxiety. If one sees the world map this is an area that ships or planes cannot avoid and is one of the most travelled parts of the sea.
The subject had so much fascination for the world at large that inventive minds saw an opportunity and so many books, research papers, and even a movie was made.
Science, that does not believe in the paranormal, was not willing to accept the presence of a mystery. So as is natural this subject was thoroughly examined by scientific minds and research studies were conducted to understand or give some explanation to these disappearances.
Some facts about the area. The area is the home of the “Gulf Steam”, which is a major surface current in the sea, primarily driven by water circulation due to temperature variations and originates in the Gulf of Mexico and flows through the Straits of Florida into the North Atlantic. This is bang in the middle of the Triangle location. The Gulf Stream is in essence a “river within the ocean”, and like a river does, this also can and does carry floating objects. This is a very strong current with a surface velocity of about 2 meters per second, so anything that stops or sinks in that area can be swiftly carried away. One explanation on why no debris was ever found from the lost vessels.
Another fact is this is area is prone to violent weather, hurricanes are powerful storms that form in tropical waters and have historically cost thousands of lives and caused billions of dollars in damage. These storms have in the past caused a number of incidents related to the Triangle. In the days before the advent of weather satellites the ships or aircraft had little or no warning of a hurricane’s approach. Another significant fact is the presence of large fields of methane hydrates (a form of natural gas) in this continental shelf. These cause eruptions producing frothy water that lowers the density of the seawater which results in the sea unable to provide the buoyancy required to keep a ship afloat resulting in its sinking rapidly without warning. Any floating debris that may come up would have been quickly taken away by the gulf stream thus leaving no trace.
While scientists and researchers strongly refute any mystery to the disappearances, the fact that so many ships and aircraft have been lost in a particular region of the world has till date failed to completely unravel the mystery of the Triangle.
It will always remain an enigma.
