In the Indian Ocean, particularly in the waters of the Persian Gulf, it is common for ships to encounter areas of luminous water, a phenomenon that was already described by the writer Rudyard Kipling and that also appears in Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. . For a long time these stories were thought to be imaginations or simple exaggerations by sailors, who as early as the 17th century described the existence of luminous waters like fields of ice on a moonless night , or bright waters stretching out in all directions. Since 1915, 235 such seas have been documented, concentrated mostly in the northwestern Indian Ocean and near Java, although they have also been seen off the coast of Somalia and Portugal. And, of course, we have Puerto Rico’s famous bioluminescent bay, Mosquito Bay , a place where a type of plankton proliferates that, when moving, release energy in the form of blue light. According to researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory, Division of Meteorology, in California, and the National Geophysical Data Center, the light in these seas may come from huge populations of bacteria, although their short duration has made it difficult to ascertain the origin of such phosphorescence.
But there are still more strange luminous phenomena in the seas. Sometimes you can see globes of light emerging from the waters and exploding on the surface, lights revolving around a point, rings of light expanding on a clear night , bands of light stationary on the surface of the sea… While the sailors stay among amazed and stunned by observing these phenomena, scientists have generally ignored them.
It may be the same mechanism that underlies auroras. In this sense, the luminous “fog” that often accompanies low-lying auroras resembles what sailors see in the Persian Gulf. Some point to a peculiar interaction between radar and the well-known marine phosphorescence , while others point to the collective and self-generated behavior of certain luminescent marine organisms, similar to the flashes caused by clouds of fireflies in the tropics.
Of course, what was narrated by the second officer of the WMS Olympic Challenger , Armin Roth, in the Marine Observer magazine in 1954 escapes any explanation: “One meter above the surface of the water, fast-moving bands of light suddenly appeared (similar to the fog). They were two nautical miles (3.7 km) across, rotating clockwise, and crossing the ship at regular intervals.” If this happened in the Gulf of Oman on November 5, 1953, on April 24 in the Gulf of Siam the crew of the MV Rafaela faced something similar: three intersecting wheels of light , one turning clockwise. clockwise and two counterclockwise. What these sailors observed… we will never know.
