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Anyone know of any recent cases of missing planes and ships, and/or abandoned ships in the area known as the Bermuda Triangle?
 
I don't think there's been any for ages, the vortex has become dormant but the lights are still active in that region. Everybody avoids it now and any disappearances would be covered up anyway, the tourist industries don't want to lose trade because of a "superstision", right?
 
Or Perhaps navigation and the building of ships and planes has advanced to the stage where we no longer suddenly lose them in the type of stoems common to the region?
 
Has any body considered the theory that the weather conditions there have become more favourable due to the greenhouse effect?
 
Pipe down Tin-can. Its an invasion...we gotta get off this planet before they come throught the gate!
 
There was a brilliant documentary on this on BBC2 a while ago (Horizon or Equinox or something) that suggested the cause of this phenomenon was pockets of natural gas in the sea floor coming bubbling out. This fills the water with bubbles causing it to become super-fluid and resulting in any vessel sinking in seconds- there was very impressive film of this happening to an oil rig in the Black Sea. This can also affect both navigational equipment and aircraft, although I don't recall how. It seemed a very credible explanation of the phenomenon to me...
 
Now, I seem to remember reading recently that the Bermuda Triangle was never really a "phenomenon" itself but an attempt to create an anomily on paper, that really anywhere you look on a map would have a similar amount of unexplainible phenomenon.

In particular, the report of the lost squadron of planes. I know I read a detailed account of the facts there, and the more sensational accounts ("My god - what is that light!" kind of stuff) was totally made up, and the actual tapes reveal is that their basic map work was wrong, the commander was SURE he knew where he was, and they just kept turning further and further out to sea, where they just crashed when they ran out of fuel. The planes sent after them just stayed out too long, IIRC.

Is there anybody on board who is still convinced of the Bermuda Triangle? What is the compelling reported phenomenon besides statistics and the "lost squadron"?
 
I remember reading a great book that kind of explained it for me, it said that a section of the sea round there (the Sargassian Sea?) has a large amount of seaweed type stuff in it (cant remember what the technical name for it is) that creates gas bubbles that lierally suck things into it.
Someone with a brain will likely know the clever stuff behind that ramble.. :D
 
Ships and aircraft haven't stopped passing through the area of the 'Bermuda Traingle' at any point. The 'disappearances' tend to be greatly exaggerated too. Weather conditions are the most likely cause for most missing things in the area - altho' I remember seeing that documentary and it was an impressive theory. I've always thought that the infamous Flight 19 disappearance was down to navigational error by novice pilots, leading to the whole flight having to ditch due to lack of fuel far out to sea.
 
McAvennie said:
I remember reading a great book that kind of explained it for me, it said that a section of the sea round there (the Sargassian Sea?) has a large amount of seaweed type stuff in it (cant remember what the technical name for it is) that creates gas bubbles that lierally suck things into it.
Someone with a brain will likely know the clever stuff behind that ramble.. :D

The seaweed is Sargassum, funnily enough. What you have there is a muddle of various different theories.
 
Mr. R.I.N.G. said:
Is there anybody on board who is still convinced of the Bermuda Triangle? What is the compelling reported phenomenon besides statistics and the "lost squadron"?

I like the story about the decommissioned battleship being towed through by two tugs. The standard milky fog came along and engulfed it. All night the weather was like that, but in the morning it had cleared up. Both tugs found their towlines parted and the battleship was gone. There are lots and lots of stories like that, but the sea in general is a weird place and they aren't all that localised. It's more like the Bermuda Splodge.
The similar area off of Japan is more interesting; it regularly gobbles up oil tankers and bulk freighters much larger than anything that's been lost off of Florida.
 
The notion of the Bermuda Triangle was a massive popular success
and the term has even entered the language as a metaphore.

Unfortunately Berlitz's book has been blasted out of the water time
after time not for being inaccurate or careless but for being a great
steaming heap of lies. Some ships appear to have been made up
while others were wrecked thousands of miles away!

We are left with the fact that some stretches of water are hazardous
to shipping. Cor! :rolleyes:
 
James Whitehead said:
The notion of the Bermuda Triangle was a massive popular success
and the term has even entered the language as a metaphore.

Unfortunately Berlitz's book has been blasted out of the water time
after time not for being inaccurate or careless but for being a great
steaming heap of lies. Some ships appear to have been made up
while others were wrecked thousands of miles away!

We are left with the fact that some stretches of water are hazardous
to shipping. Cor! :rolleyes:

Berlitz! I think thats the guy whose book I read.
Once again a childhood mystery turned out to be easily explainable. Damned scepticaemia setting in more so :'(
 
James Whitehead said:
The notion of the Bermuda Triangle was a massive popular success
and the term has even entered the language as a metaphore.

Unfortunately Berlitz's book has been blasted out of the water time
after time not for being inaccurate or careless but for being a great
steaming heap of lies. Some ships appear to have been made up
while others were wrecked thousands of miles away!

We are left with the fact that some stretches of water are hazardous
to shipping. Cor! :rolleyes:

Hmm, yes. He uses the phrase ' West of the Azores' a lot. That covers a whole lot of ocean.
 
A long article here (see the second article on the page) discusses gas hydrates and how they could be implicated in the loss of sea-going ships and certain aircraft.
 
Bermuda Triangle SFX

Gulf experiment seeks to explain the Bermuda Triangle Long article, begins:
Some scientists wonder if giant gas bubbles could be sucking ships beneath the Bermuda Triangle.

A Hollywood special effects master, armed with a physicist, air compressors, hoses, and a heavy boat, came to the Gulf Coast to prove it could be true.

Wednesday, workers re-enacted a science experiment that led to the gas bubble hypothesis. They forced compressed air through an underwater grid, forcing bubbles to the surface and, after five tries, sucking a Sea Ray cruiser under the water.



"I knew it was going to sink," said Philip Beck, 12, whose father, Phil, orchestrated the event. "It was going down!"

The experiment had been carried out in tubs with tiny boats, but never on the sea with a lifesize boat.

"It was doing it out on the ocean. That was the key," said Steve Wilkinson, an executive producer with the BBC, which filmed the event. "It's one thing to test in a tank, but to do it out in the water with currents … is another."

The BBC and the Discovery Channel contracted Phil Beck, who owns Awesome FX, a special effects company, and physicist Bruce Denardo to test the theory for a film expected to be released next year.

"We're looking at the Bermuda Triangle mysteries with fresh eyes," said BBC Executive Producer Steve Wilkinson. "There is background to some of the myths."
 
I thought it had already been proved that deposits of solid methane on the ocean bed ( concentrated in certain areas such as the Bermuda triangle) can 'evaporate' to the surface and sink vessells, and for that matter aircraft that would lose lift just as a ship loses bouyancy?
 
This bubble theory has been around for years, Equinox or Horizon covered it some while ago. As BE says the source was though to be the methane hydrides deposited in the seabed, which under some condiditions can release vast quantities of gas in a very short time turning the water to foam.

Just checked the news item, and yes that's the story.

There seems to be a life-cycle with these sort of mysteries.

The story appears, there's a lot excitement, a plausible explanation comes up, evereything dies down.

Between 5-10 years later the story comes up again, and the same explanation as last time is presented as a new discovery.
 
The story didn't claim to be about a new theory, just the first full scale test of it (as opposed to testing models in tanks).
 
Methane Bubbles Could Sink Ships, Scientists Find

Tue Oct 21, 3:33 PM ET Add Science - Reuters to My Yahoo!


By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Methane bubbles from the sea floor could, in theory, sink ships and may explain the odd disappearances of some vessels, Australian researchers reported on Tuesday.


The huge bubbles can erupt from undersea deposits of solid methane, known as gas hydrates. An odorless gas found in swamps and mines, methane becomes solid under the enormous pressures found on deep sea floors.

The ice-like methane deposits can break off and become gaseous as they rise, creating bubbles at the surface.

David May and Joseph Monaghan of Monash University in Australia said they had demonstrated how a giant bubble from one of these deposits could swamp a ship.

"Sonar surveys of the ocean floor in the North Sea (between Britain and continental Europe) have revealed large quantities of methane hydrates and eruption sites," May and Monaghan wrote in their report, published in the American Journal of Physics.

"A recent survey revealed the presence of a sunken vessel within the center of one particularly large eruption site, now known as the Witches Hole."

"One proposed sinking mechanism attributes the vessel's loss of buoyancy to bubbles of methane gas released from an erupting underwater hydrate," they wrote." The known abundance of gas hydrates in the North Sea, coupled with the vessel's final resting position and its location in the Witches Hole, all support a gas bubble theory."

No one has ever seen such an eruption and no one knows how large the bubbles coming off a methane deposit would be.

May and Monaghan created a model of a single large bubble coming up under a ship. They trapped water between vertical glass plates, launched gas bubbles from the bottom and used a video camera to record what happened to an acrylic "hull" floating on the surface.

"Whether or not the ship will sink depends on its position relative to the bubble. If it is far enough from the bubble, it is safe," they wrote.

"If it is exactly above the bubble, it also is safe, because at a stagnation point of the flow the boat is not carried into the trough. The danger position is between the bubble's stagnation point and the edge of the mound where the trough formed," they concluded. ).

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...3&e=1&u=/nm/20031021/sc_nm/science_bubbles_dc
 
Flight 19/Bermuda Triangle programme the other night

Apologies if a thread already exists, i can't seem to find one, but feel free to merge if there is...

There was a documentary on BBC1 on Saturday night about the Bermuda Triangle and specifically the fate of Flight 19, a flight of 5 US Navy Avengers which went missing without trace on a routine flight in 1945.

Apparently a team with a submersible has found 5 sunken Avengers clustered together near where they thought Flight 19 should have sunk, but examination of the numbers on the tailfins proved they were not Flight 19, but in fact 5 planes which sunk on different occasions and only coincidentally ended up so close together.

There was some other guy with a theory that rather than being mysteriously blown off course and all their compasses malfunctioning, the pilot in charge of the flight actually had some weird mental block that made him think he was in a different place and going in a different direction to where he was, due to the coincidental similarity between some islands in the Bahamas and some other idslands in the Florida Keys. Sounded quite convincing, but not sure whether it was a debunking of the Bermuda Triangle or not...

Also they theorised some of the mysterious boat sinkings could be due to large amounts of gas bubbling up from under the sea bed and altering the density of the water, which they demonstrated with a test boat.

Anyone else see it? Opinions?
 
Re: Flight 19/Bermuda Triangle programme the other night

Goldstein said:
Apparently a team with a submersible has found 5 sunken Avengers clustered together near where they thought Flight 19 should have sunk, but examination of the numbers on the tailfins proved they were not Flight 19, but in fact 5 planes which sunk on different occasions and only coincidentally ended up so close together.
Now, that was odd. The same type of plane, different flights, different accidents, different years even, and all ending up so close together, 785ft down, that the investigators (thinking they were all from the same flight), were speculating on how they'd all managed to crash dive into the sea at precisely the same time, virtually in formation.

Quite a coincidence. :confused:
 
Bugger, bugger, bugger, I missed it!

Still, it's the Beeb, so no doubt it will be repeated before long . . .

Carole
 
Another problem is that alot of boats and aircraft that are supposed to have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle haven't actually disappeared. The documentary bandied around words like 'thousands' when talking about the numbers involved. I seem to recall reading somewhere (maybe in Paul Begg's 'Into Thin Air') that alot of the mythology for this sort of stuff lies with Charles Berlitz, who was not exactly what you'd call a most avid researcher. So it may be that all these weird and wonderful theories are working from the assumption that alot of materiel is being lost in the Triangle. Flight 19's disappearance has never struck me as being unusual (i.e. weird), I must say.

As for the gas theory, this was previously given a whole programme ('Equinox', on Channel 4, in about 1990/1991). It is plausible and possible - but whether it's actually the responsible factor is another thing entirely.
 
I caught most of the programme which wasn't great.
I seem to remember reading that there was a mythology Probably from the Berlitz book, as mentioned that had rarely been questioned that there were more disappearances or losses of ships within the so called triangle but in fact the numbers were not much greater compared with outside of the triangle so you could take any arbitrary area and get similar results. The whole ocean was potentially dangerous, in other words but nothing particularly so within the fabled triangle.


Though Barry Manilow is grateful it gave him the idea for a catchy song.
 
Re: Flight 19

Originally posted by Resologist


As for the disappearance of ships by the sudden release of methane gas from the seabed, I must laugh. Is there any evidence of this ever happening, with or without any ships sinking amidst the bubbles?


Depends what you mean by evidence, if you mean no ship ever sent a message saying we're sinking due to bubbles, I doubt they would have had time.
 
Resologist said:
As for the disappearance of ships by the sudden release of methane gas from the seabed, I must laugh. Is there any evidence of this ever happening, with or without any ships sinking amidst the bubbles?
There was some footage from the 1990's of a North Sea Oil rig tilted over and nearly swallowed up by just such a release of gas on the programme. It get's a mention in the article below. So there is some evidence of sinking due to a methane 'blowout'.

New Scientist: 'Swallowing Ships' 29 November 00

There was a picture to go with the article:
 
Well, that depends if there are indeed any 'facts' behind these 'mysteries'...

A scientist trying to come up with some explanation for the Traingle is perhaps just as mislead as others into thinking that anything that's alleged to have happened in that area has actually taken place.
 
Another angle to all this, ref ship not planes disappearing

If memory serves, there have been reports of 'mega waves'.

These measure apporx 60-70ft but may well be larger. They seem to originate far out to see and have rarely been seen. Indeed many scientists dimissed the old seamen's tales as myth.

However I recoall an article on the bbc or newscientist website that told the tale of Germany's 2nd largest aircraft carrier. This was sunk without trace a year or so ago by one of these mega waves.

My proposition is couldn't they take out low flying planes and obviously any sea vessels in their path?

Also what do they do to the atmoshere above them in term of pressure wave fronts etc. (or it it the pressure that creates the waves? can't remember).

Just my two pennies.

As for the flight in question. imo it was pilot error/mechanical failure that caused then to go missing.

btw methane out gassing from the sea bed is killing off masses of fish stocks off the coast off Africa. The effect would definately change the properties of the water and could well sink a ship due to the change in water density.
 
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