The ocean still hides many secrets that can be terrifying. A journey to the depths of the sea to discover the most amazing unsolved mysteries of the oceans.
When we dive into the vastness of the ocean, we travel to a new world. A world that, despite being part of ours, remains a true unknown. There are still plenty of things we don’t know about the deep oceans. The sea still harbors secrets and mysteries that are a headache for scientists around the world.
And it is that when we know that we have barely explored 5% of the oceans , we cannot help but make our skin stand on end. 95% of the ocean depths remain unmapped. Who knows what the depths of the sea await us?
Since ancient times, many legends about the mysteries of the ocean have been passed from generation to generation. And although there are some that have been classified as mere myths, other stories continue to put the scientific community in check.
Get ready, because in today’s article we will embark on an amazing journey to the depths of the oceans to discover the most incredible mysteries and secrets that are hidden in the immensity of the sea. You will never see the ocean the same way again.
What are the most amazing secrets of the deep sea?
The Earth’s seas and oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface. We are talking about a global extension of 361 million km² and a volume of water of about 1,300 million km³. The sea is so immense that, obviously, it hides mysteries and secrets that leave you cold. And who knows which ones are still waiting to be found. Let’s start our journey.
The monster waves
The legends of the sailors speak of monstrous waves that appeared without warning and that rose like perfectly vertical walls of water more than 25 meters high without any climatological or geological phenomenon to explain it. Still, everything we thought we knew about the ocean led us to classify these stories as myths.
But everything changed when, in January 1995, at the Draupner Station oil platform in the North Sea, near Norway, a 26-meter wave was recorded hitting the station . A monster wave like the one of the legends. This evidence prompted unprecedented research that culminated in the claim that these walls of water, despite being incredibly rare, could indeed form in the open ocean. Many unexplained disappearances could be due to these ocean monsters.
The Kraken
The Kraken is a colossal sea creature that is part of Scandinavian mythology and is described as a giant squid capable of sinking any ship. And although we believed that they were simple legends, since we discovered the existence of colossal squids in 1925, the myth became something closer to reality.
Giant squid exist and, living at a depth of about 2,200 meters in the Antarctic Ocean, they can measure up to 15 meters in length , making them the largest known invertebrate. Even so, only six specimens of the species, which is named Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni , have been discovered . It is believed that there could be much larger specimens and even more colossal species that we have not yet discovered.
The Devil’s Sea
The Devil’s Sea or Dragon Triangle is a region of the Pacific Ocean around Miyake Island, about 100 kilometers south of the city of Tokyo, Japan. Popular culture places this sea as, along with the Bermuda Triangle, one of the areas in the world where the most disappearances of planes and ships take place.
There has been talk of the disappearance of 5 military ships along with their crew of more than 700 people and a disappearance of a research ship with more than 100 scientists on board. But it is not clear whether it actually occurred in this region.
The Baltic Sea Anomaly
Year 2011. The Swedish diving team OceanX is carrying out an expedition in the Gulf of Bothnia, located between western Finland and eastern Sweden, being the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea. Suddenly they encountered something very strange.
A 60 meter diameter structure with an unnatural design in an area where, surprisingly, they were registering electrical interference. A construction that looks quite similar to the Millennium Falcon. What will it be? A military project? An incredibly peculiar natural formation? The remains of an alien ship? Han Solo’s parking lot?
The secrets of the Mariana Trench
The Mariana Trench is the deepest point in the ocean. Located in the western Pacific Ocean, it is a depression on the seabed with an extension of 2,550 km, a width of 69 km and a crescent shape that, at its deepest point, located in the extreme south, reaches a depth of 11,034 meters . This point is called Challenger’s Deep.
In it, the pressure is a thousand times higher than what is experienced at sea level and the temperature is between 1 °C and 4 °C. Conditions are so extreme that only four expeditions have been completed. Who knows what life forms capable of living at this depth will remain to be discovered?
The giant cannibal shark
Year 2013. A team of Australian scientists implant a tracking device in a 2.7 meter long white shark to study the temperature changes that take place in the oceans. To everyone’s surprise, the device, a few months later, washed up on the coast. The white shark had been eaten by some creature.
But what animal could devour one of nature’s most powerful predators? Everything indicated that it had been an even larger white shark, at least 5 meters long. But it remains unclear why the animal would attack and devour a member of its own species. A giant cannibalistic white shark or another colossal creature we don’t know about yet? Place your bets.
The Ghost Ship Kaz II
April 15, 2007. The Kaz II, a 9.8 meter catamaran, leaves the port of Airlie Beach, a small Australian town, with a crew of three: Derek Batten, Peter Tunstead and James Tunstead, three sailors with relatively little experience. What was going to be a trip to explore the coast of Australia led to one of the strangest disappearances in recent history.
And it is that on April 20, the Kaz II was discovered adrift about 163 kilometers from the coast with the engine running, a laptop on, the table set with food, but with no sign of the crew. The three men were not on the boat . To this day, it remains unclear what happened to the crew. All the circumstances were very strange.
The Bloop
May 19, 1997. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration detected, off the coast of Chile, about 5,000 km from Iloca, a coastal town, a powerful sound that they named Bloop . A strange sound that lasted 7 minutes and descended slowly in an almost subsonic frequency range but with enough volume to be detected.
Although it was believed that it could have been generated by a giant squid or a new species of whale even larger than the blue whale, both hypotheses were ruled out. It is currently believed that it could have appeared due to large icebergs cracking and fracturing, but this theory has never been proven. We do not know what caused this strange sound.
Atlantis
Atlantis is the name given to a mythical island described in the texts of the Greek philosopher Plato . An ancient civilization that was a military power that dominated Western Europe and North Africa until a catastrophe caused it to disappear to the bottom of the ocean. Since then, its search has been part of popular culture, although the most accepted hypothesis is that it never existed.
The structures of Yonaguni
Yonaguni Island is a small island in Japan with a population of just over 1,600. In 1985, the Japanese diver Kihachirō Aratake discovered in its waters, by chance, a set of structures that, to this day, remain the subject of controversy.
It seems to be a megalith, a prehistoric refuge of an ancient civilization of stone blocks carved by humans, although it is not ruled out that it is a natural formation modified by humans. Is it the real Atlantis?
The Gulf of Mexico Shipwreck
May 2019. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is conducting tests with underwater drones in the Gulf of Mexico, the ocean basin between the coastlines of Mexico, the United States and Cuba. Suddenly the sonar found a strange wreck . A mysterious ship built about 200 years ago about which we know very little beyond the fact that it was on fire at the time of the shipwreck and that, among the wood, there is a number: 2109.
The ghost island of Bermeja
Bermeja Island is (or appears to be) an island indicated on various maps and historical documents, which indicate that it is located about 100 kilometers northwest of the Yucatan Peninsula. But when the modern expeditions went there in 2009, there was nothing .
Bermeja Island was a ghost island. Had disappeared? No. Apparently the island had never existed. Everything had been a cartographic error that remained throughout the years.
The Beast of Stronsay
September 25, 1808. A strange body appears on the shores of Stronsay, an island in Scotland. He was a globster, an unidentified organic mass whose identity is controversial. It was a kind of animal of 16 meters in length that was missing part of its tail, so it could surely be much larger.
The Edinburgh Natural History Society was unable to identify the creature, which was considered to be a new species of sea snake, although it was later estimated that it could be a decomposing basking shark.
The Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle is a geographical area located in the Atlantic Ocean, between the city of Miami, the Bermuda Islands and Puerto Rico , the three vertices of the equilateral triangle that describes it and that has an area of 1.5 million square kilometers. . Ever since a crew of 5 US Army planes disappeared in this region in 1945, this area has been talked about as a place where strange disappearances of planes and ships happened.
Even so, it is not even clear that the rate of disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle is higher than in other regions of the ocean and, as much as there are strange theories involving Atlantis, black holes and even alien abductions, surely there would be a simpler scientific explanation, being the unpredictable climate of this region a hypothesis widely accepted by the community.
The megalodon
The megalodon is an extinct species of shark that lived between 2 and 2.6 million years ago with the scientific name Otodus megalodon . It is considered one of the largest and most powerful predators in history, since its maximum length estimates, based on the remains of teeth found (up to 17 centimeters in length), are 18 meters. And a weight of 59 tons. A monster that we know inhabited the Earth’s oceans . But what if they were still out there?