Bermuda Triangle: Science of the Abyss Page #5

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acid rain.

Once the limestone

comes out of the water,

we can actually apply acid rain,

and this happens

over thousand of years.

The surface of the land

has cracks, dips.

So this acid rain,

when we actually pour that on,

you can see what it's doing

to this limestone.

Those bubbles are turning this

into carbon dioxide gas

and liquid

and it's just running away,

and so that etches

through the valleys

and the puddles, and over time,

that's going to cause

a matrix of caves.

The walls of the caves

became so thin,

they collapsed,

creating a long vertical shaft.

Eventually, the sea level

rose back again,

leaving behind a blue hole

hundreds of feet deep.

As a geologist,

these are fascinating.

They're mysterious.

But when you figure out

how they form,

it's really magical in a sense

where it takes a long time

for them to form

and it's a beautiful

series of events.

You have to have

sea levels change.

You have to have acid ran occur.

You have to have

a whole scenario

for it to finally drop down

and form your blue hole.

It's not just geologists

who find blue holes fascinating.

They're near the top of every

scuba diver's bucket list.

That means the blue holes

of the Bermuda triangle

are some of the most widely

explored underwater habitats

in the area.

The chances of aliens

being hidden from

so many prying eyes

seems very unlikely.

But if aliens aren't

abducting ships,

why do so many of them seem to

disappear without trace?

There's nothing mysterious

about the fact

that we have trouble

finding the wreckage.

I mean, the ocean is a vast deep

and it's really hard to find

something on the bottom floor

even if you have

the general idea

of where the ship went down.

So, blue holes,

they're beautiful,

they're fascinating,

they're mysterious.

Aliens?

I don't know about that.

We've seen hurricanes,

time-shifting fog,

and explosions from the deep.

But there's one more

potential explanation,

and it could be

the most terrifying yet.

For over 70 years,

boats have been going missing

in the Bermuda triangle,

including vast cargo ships.

A busy route for these

floating giants

passes by the island of Bermuda,

and it's the setting for

one of the most

mysterious disappearances

of them all.

October 24, 1980.

A vessel called the ss poet,

hauling a load of corn to Egypt.

This is a vessel that is larger

than the size

of two football fields,

and it goes missing

without a trace.

The coast guard search

the Atlantic for ten days,

but didn't even find a trace

of the 11,000-ton ship.

Okay, there was a little bit

of adverse weather in the area

at the time, but nothing

that should have capsized a...

a boat of this size,

so what happened to it?

Where did it go?

A clue to

the disappearance of the poet

is that the captain didn't issue

a mayday message.

This would seem to suggest

that whatever happened

to that vessel

happened so quickly,

there was no time to react.

Some scientists believe the poet

may have been a victim of a rare

but incredibly violent

freak of nature

called a rogue wave.

Rogue waves are

incredibly rare waves

that rise up much higher

than the waves around them.

They can sweep away ships

without warning.

When you have a big storm

or you have high waves

and you get one of these waves

that's just much bigger

than the other waves,

that's a rogue wave.

They're not common,

but when you look at

a large surface,

if it's a big storm,

maybe it could be

one out of 500 waves...

big waves that goes by

might be that really big one.

Rogue waves are rare

because they require

a specific set of

circumstances to form.

Are you ready to turn on

the coalescing wave packet?

Yeah, we're getting ready.

Five minutes.

No, I've got it in five.

Brian simulates

this process in a lab

by first creating a slow wave

and then a faster wave

which catches up to the first

and merges with it,

creating a much larger

rogue wave.

Scaled up to the open ocean,

rogue waves can break

with incredible force.

It can knock giant holes

into large ships.

It can twist them into...

to incredible angles

because it's just

such a huge amount

of energy being imparted.

The broken geology

of the Bermuda triangle

is perfect for

cooking up rogue waves.

In a storm, waves bend inward

as they pass small islands.

And sometimes,

the two converging waves

combine perfectly to create

monster rogue waves.

Rogue waves can also form

when a strong current

bends waves

in towards each other,

another feature common

to the Bermuda triangle.

Going right through the middle

of the Bermuda triangle

is one of the world's

great currents,

the Gulf stream,

which has tremendous

current velocities

and has large shears

that can focus the waves.

In the Bermuda triangle,

waves can sometimes

run into strong currents.

These currents alter the shape

of the rushing waves,

making them much larger.

The stronger the current,

the bigger the waves

it can produce.

It's entirely possible that a...

a ship such as the poet,

which was in a storm...

it was in storm conditions

and it was in an area

on the north wall

of the Gulf stream

where this kind of focusing

is known to happen,

and so that...

that's an entirely

plausible explanation for

something that could have

caused that ship to be lost.

For nearly a century,

we have sought answers

to the mysterious disappearances

of boats and planes

inside the Bermuda triangle.

Any number of theories

have been raised,

from alien abductions

to killer bubbles

from the bottom of the sea.

But the more scientists

look into the mystery,

the more they realize that

maybe there's nothing special

about the Bermuda triangle

after all.

So the Bermuda triangle

has this idea

that there's

an inordinate number

of missing planes

and ships and accidents

and things like that

in this little triangular area,

in a highly trafficked area.

And so when somebody says,

"wow, it's an unusual number

of accidents

and disappearances,"

unusual compared to what?

Surprisingly,

statistics show that

there are no more accidents

in the Bermuda triangle

than in any other heavily

trafficked tropical sea

in the world.

If you were to take a...

a triangular area

of any part of the ocean,

you would find mysteries there,

aircraft and ships

that disappeared

for unknown reasons.

You wouldn't assume

that everything

that happened within

this arbitrary triangle

we picked out would be due

to one phenomenon.

The world's oceans

are dangerous places.

It's just that here

in the Bermuda triangle,

the disappearances

get more publicity.

There's nothing at all unusual

about anything in the area.

The only thing unusual is

it's been embellished

over the years by writers.

People like to hear

ghost stories,

like to hear mystery stories,

and so it's persistent.

I mean, you can never discount

the strength of the legs

of any bad idea.

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