The Bermuda Triangle is a mystery that has haunted the Earth since ships and planes visited and vanished from a 500,000 km square patch of ocean. It is a deadly area that lies between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda.
Why did the ships and planes keep disappearing over this triangle? Many scientists aver that it has never been clear. But now, at last, experts have arrived at an explanation. An "extremely rare, bizarre and severe weather pattern" is responsible for the disappearance, claim scientists.
They have discovered "hexagonal clouds" that are very rare formations in the North Sea near UK.
Explains Dr Steve Miller, satellite meteorologist at Colorado State University to the Science Channel's 'What On Earth': "You don't typically see straight edges with clouds. Most of the time, clouds are random in their distribution."
Scientists used radar satellites to check and gauge what happened just under the clouds. They discovered that sea level winds were leaping up to almost 170 miles an hour. This was so powerful that it triggered waves more than 45 feet high. They started 'air bombs' that were then made to fall back and crash on the ocean.
The same clouds also appeared on the western tip of the Bermuda triangle. These clouds were larger - from 20 to 55 miles across.
Says Meteorologist Randy Cerveny "These types of hexagonal shapes over the ocean are in essence air bombs. They form microbursts and they're blasts of air that come down out of the bottom of a cloud and then hit the ocean and then create waves that can sometimes be massive in size."
As the wind would blast from microbursts that would be able to spread outwards at huge speeds of 170 miles per hour, they were enough to topple ships as well as aircraft. That tells us why the USS Cyclops disappeared.
The biggest disaster happened in 1945, when five US Navy Avenger torpedo bombers from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, flew to Bimini Island, but never appeared again. There was a radio call from 14 men on the ship, trying to convey the message that their compasses had stopped.
Even three rescue planes sent after them vanished too.
While trying to figure out why it happened, experts have surmised that they may have been caused by gas explosions. Whey they found craters in Siberia, scientists from around the globe got interested in it. Due to the huge holes in the ground, a lot of gas was released from under the ground, through a process called methane hydrates. Hence, this might be the reason that air and water vessels disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, they conjecture.
However, there are a lot of skeptics who do not believe that there is any Bermuda Triangle mystery - though the area exists. As ScienceAlert explains: "In some cases there's no record of the ships and planes claimed to have been lost in the aquatic triangular graveyard; they never existed outside of a writer's imagination. In other cases, the ships and planes were real enough - but Berlitz and others neglected to mention that they 'mysteriously disappeared' during bad storms. Other times the vessels sank far outside the Bermuda Triangle."
They also concede that the hexagonal-shaped clouds are indeed creating microbursts, hitting the waves and creating further and higher waves. But that is interesting in itself, mystery or no mystery.
"So the real news here isn't the solution to a long-standing myth, it's potential evidence of a new weather phenomenon, and that's pretty cool in itself," explains sciencealert.
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