LONDON – British oceanographers have concluded a decades-long investigationinto the Bermuda Triangle and finally determined what is behind thehundreds of mysterious disappearances in the region.
The mysterious 700,000sqm triangle, stretching between the tip of Florida,Puerto Rico, and Bermuda, and has been the centre of public fascination forover 100 years when reports first started emerging of an unusual amount ofshipwrecks in the region. The New York Times claimed at least 50 ships, 20aircraft, and more than 1,000 people have succumbed to the Triangle overthe past 500 years.
Now, researchers from the University of Southampton say ships are beingsucked into the ocean by “rogue waves” over 30 meters (100ft) in height andexplained their theory on the Channel 5 documentarylinkTheBermuda Triangle Enigma.
“There are storms to the South and North, which come together… we’vemeasured waves in excess of 30 metres. The bigger the boat gets, the moredamage is done,” Dr Simon Boxall, an oceanographer who led the study, told TheSunlink.
While many theories to explain the disappearances have been floated aboutover the years, scientists first zeroed in on the freak wave hypothesiswhen a 18.5-meter rogue wave was measured in the North Sea by satellites in1995.
Rogue waves occur when an abnormally large wave crashes in the open sea.Normal waves of around 12 meters have a breaking pressure of 8.5 psi(pounds per square inch). Modern ships are designed to tolerate about 21psi, but rogue waves can have a crushing pressure of up to 140 psi – enoughto topple even the sturdiest of ships.
For the documentary, Dr Boxall and his team re-created the mammoth wavesusing indoor simulators and built a model of the USS Cyclops to see whateffect it would have on the large ship. The Cyclops went missing in thetriangle in 1918 with 309 people on board.
“If you can imagine rogue waves with peaks at either end, there’s nothingbelow the boat, so it snaps in two. If it happens, it can sink in two tothree minutes,” said Boxall.
The most recent disappearance was just last year when a plane carrying fourpeople went missing over the infamous triangle. The group had spentMother’s Day in Puerto Rico and were flying back to Florida when theirtwin-prop plane vanished from radar. The search was eventually called offand no bodies were ever found.