A chance encounter with a rare phenomenon called a milky sea connects a sailor and a scientist to explain the ocean’s ghostly glow (via hakaimagazine)
The sky was moonless and overcast, leaving no stars to steer by. Alone at the helm in the middle of the Arabian Sea, somewhere between Oman and India, I could see nothing in the ink-black night save for our ship’s dimly lit compass rolling on its gimbal mount as we heaved and swayed through three-meter seas. But half an hour into my shift, the sails above me began to glow, as if the moon had risen. But there was no moon, nor any stars or other ships.
In August 2010, author Sam Keck Scott and his crewmates were sailing in the Arabian Sea when they became some of the few people to witness a milky sea.For centuries, sailors have been describing milky seas, rare occurrences where enormous expanses of the ocean light up uniformly at night, at times stretching for tens of thousands of square kilometers, or more. W. E.
Every observation of a milky sea throughout history has been a chance encounter, as mine was, and only once did a vessel with any scientific research capabilities happen upon one, when the USSsteamed through a milky sea for three consecutive nights off the island of Socotra, Yemen, in 1985. Onboard thewas the late marine biologist David Lapota, who was working for the navy at the time studying bioluminescence.
This idea of a natural flask may help to explain why, when our boat first sailed into a milky sea, the light was diluted and nearly imperceptible, but when we exited it hours later, we crossed a distinct boundary.
Miller first became interested in milky seas in 2004 while attending an American Meteorological Society conference. There, Miller and his colleagues considered whether it might be possible to observe any type of marine bioluminescence from space. It was assumed that any small-scale bioluminescence, such as sea sparkle, produces far too weak a light signal to be seen from so far away.
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