Phenomena Of The Deep

Hawera Star, Volume LII, 3 September 1932, Page 14

Phenomena Of The Deep

Ti HE sailor, who once lived perpetually in a world of magic and mystery, does so no longer. To-day almost —but not quite —everything that happens in his natural environment is explained, after a fashion, in the text-books. Whoever is disposed to shed a sentimental tear over this fact should derive much comfort from the reports that have occasionally appeared in nautical and scientific journals during the past twenty-odd years concerning a weird luminous phenomenon of the Indian seas for which science cannot offer even the ghost of an explanation. Each of these reports, unsupported by the others, would impose too severe a strain upon our credulity to receive serious attention, but. the miracle seems to be established by a plentitude of testimony. Poe might have invented the tales of this marine marvel, beginning with one published in the Nautical. Meteorological Institute for 1910. This report narrates the experiences of Captain Gabe of the Danish steamship Bintang, who in June, 1909, while his vessel was passing through the Strait of Malacca, was summoned on deck in the small hours of the morning to watch an enormous sj’stem of light rays sweeping over the surf ace. of the water. The rays appeared to be revolving, like the spokes of a. wheel, around a centre several miles away, which w 7 as first astern, then passed the ship off the starboard beam, and, when the lights were last seen, had reached a position dead ahead. The rays were curved, with their concavity in the direction of rotation.; they were about six feet broad, with intervals twice as great between them; and. they swept by at the rate of one a second. The whole display lasted about fifteen minutes.

In the following year a somewhat similar display was observed from the Dutch steamship Valentijn near the Natuna Islands in the South China Sea, a few hundrd miles from the scene of the Bintang ? s experience. The vessel was steaming south at a speed of eight knots; the sea was smooth and the sky clear. Suddenly about midnight the eastern horizon became illuminated with a pulsating light, which soon developed into a wlieel-like system of rays, as in the previous display, but iu this ease the rays were straight. The rotation was against the sun, one ray passing every half second. The centre shifted toward the ship, apparently passed beneath it, and moved away in the opposite side until the lights became invisible at 12.40 a.m.

Several more recent eases have been described in “The Marine Observer,” a journal published for the' information of mariners by the British Meteorological Office. Hardly less remarkable than these gigantic phosphorescent wheels are certain other luminous appearances in the water reported by credible witnesses from the seas about India. At tlie entrance to the Persian Gulf in 1906 the steamship Patrick Stewart encountered narrow bars of light twenty feet apart, moving straight forward at a speed of 100 to 200 miles an hour. This display was watched for a quarter of an hour and was followed a few minutes later by another briefer display of the same kind. In the same region, and subsequently off the delta of the Indus, in 1900-01, the steamship Kilwa passed through, concentric rings of phosphorescence which appeared to spread out at au enormous speed—estimated at thirty miles a minute—and gave the sea an appearance suggesting a field of corn swept over by a strong breeze. These displays covered an area of roughly fifty square miles. Seemingly miraculous as they are, all these pyrotechnical manifestations of Easterp waters will doubtless be explained in time^ —and one more mystery will be banished from the deep. The best that science can do about them at present is to bring them into relation with other mysteries pertaining to the broad and littleexplored doman of luminescence- —a term applying to all the numerous varieties of “cold light,” of which the ordinary phosporescence of the sea is one of the most familiar examples.

The power of producing - light is common to a great variety of marine creatures of _all sixes, including big fishes, but the sheet-like illumination' of the ocean surface over extensive areas is due to minute organisms, microscopic or barely visible to the naked eye, filling the water in inconceivable numbers. We must suppose that these tiny organisms cause the spectacular

Gigantic Phosphorescent Wheels

Startling Sea Mirages and Waterspouts

displays just described, not by performing actual movements in the water corresponding to the evolutions observed, but by lighting up momentarily in response to a stimulus of some sort that sweeps in successive waves over the sea.

Few natural phenomena of the sea are now out-and-out mysteries from the scientific point of ;v,iew, though many (are (still imperfectly understood and still are' so unfamiliar to the world at large that they are frequently reported in newspapers and quasi-scientific journals as inexplicable wonders. Certain organisms, some of which are phosphorescent at night, cause a marked discolouration of the ocean surface in the daytime. The “milky sea” encountered by a British ship not long ago in the tropical North Atlantic belonged to this category of marvels. A less rare but equally startling phenomenon is the reddening of the water by organisms of several species, including the tiny jelly-like specks of Noctiluca, hundreds of tons of which are sometimes washed on shore in the Red Sea until the beach appears to be covered with piles of blood.

Noctiluca is phosphorescent and was recognised by naturalists as a luminous animal long before marine phosphorescence in general ceased to be a mystery to science, writes C. F. Tollman in the “New York Times Magazine.” Some authorities thought the sea became phosphorescent by absorbing sunlight in the daytime and giving it out at night; others regarded the phenomenon as an electrical glow due to friction, and it was not until the year 1810 that the true cause was demonstrated by J. Macartney in a paper presented to the Royal Society of London.

Another luminous phenomenon that refuses to be relegated to “the dull catalogue of common things,” despite the fact that sailors and others have been acquainted with it since remote antiquity, is the electrical brush discharge known as St. Elmo’s fire or corposants. The brushes of Sit. Elmo are usually small, but they sometimes appear in such numbers as to form brilliant and complex displays. On the evening of October 18. 19*30, hundreds were seen at one time during a severe thunderstorm, perched along the aerial of the steamship Minnewaska, en route from London to New York. While the great Krakatoa eruption of 1883 was in progress all the vessels for many leagues around the island were studded with corposants. Such eases involve nothing mysterious in a scientific sense —however marvellous they may seem to the average sailor or traveller —but, on the other hand, if half the stories are true that have been told about unusual forms of St. Elmo’s fire or other luminous appearances supposed to be akin to it. much remains to be learned.

What natural spectacle could seem, to the untutored sailor, more difficult of rational explanation than certain varieties of mirage, including the images of ships sailing, erect or inverted, in the sky (whence the legend of the “Flying Dutchman”), and the phantasmagoric shapes of Fata Morgana sometimes encountered along seaeoasts and in the polar icefields? Mirage plays queer pranks, startling even to scientific observers. Last year passengers on the Mauretania watched a distant steamer undergo transformations worthy of the animated cartoons of the kinema, but that was nothing to the mirage seen from Shaekleton’s ship in the Antarctic, when the sun, after setting, rose clear of the horizon and set again 15 minutes later; or the two suns seen setting one above the other from the British steamship Bendigo in May, 1928.

The waterspout, though' it still appeals strongly to the imagination of mankind, and though popular fallacies about it are still rife, is hardly a mystery to a man of science or to the educated seaman; but go back a few centuries and you find it the subject of fantastic beliefs and speculations. Most authorities saw in it a living monster of some sort; religious rites and various noise-making processes were the customary methods of driving it away. The gross superstitions and the gross ignorances have been swept from the sea; but that is not to say that mankind approaches finality of knowledge with respect to the ways of nature, either by sea or land. Science is forever “climbing up the climbing wave” and perhaps will continue to do so to the end of time.