What is the Bermuda Triangle?

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The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil’s Triangle, is a loosely defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The idea of the area as uniquely prone to disappearances arose in the mid-20th century, but most reputable sources dismiss the idea that there is any mystery.

A source of fascination for sailors, researchers and crackpots alike, the Bermuda Triangle is a roughly 500,000-square-mile expanse of the Atlantic Ocean located off the coast of Florida.

Descriptions of its borders vary, but most accounts cite the three points of the “triangle” as Miami, Puerto Rico and the island of Bermuda.

Reports of bizarre activity in the region date back to the days of Christopher Columbus, who reported unusual compass activity while traveling through it en route to the New World, but the Triangle would later earn a reputation as a dead zone for planes and ships after a string of unexplained disappearances in the 20th century.

In 1945, five U.S. Navy aircraft known as “Flight 19” got lost and vanished in the triangle during a training mission.

While the pilots most likely ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea, no trace of the planes or their 14 crewmembers was ever found.

Another famous mystery dates to 1963, when the tanker ship SS Marine Sulphur Queen sank near Key West, Florida. Life preservers and other items were later discovered drifting in the water, but the exact cause of the disaster remains unknown, and the wreck has never been recovered.

Writers like Charles Berlitz helped popularize the Bermuda Triangle mystery in the 1960s and 1970s, and its treacherous reputation has since been chalked up to everything from intergalactic portals and time vortexes to paranormal phenomena and even the lost city of Atlantis.

But despite the hysteria, government organizations and shipping companies don’t show the triangle on any official maps, and groups ranging from the U.S. Coast Guard to the global insurance outfit Lloyd’s of London maintain that the region doesn’t have an unusually high rate of maritime disasters.

Other skeptics note that the triangle sits in an area famous for rogue waves and storms, and they blame any disappearances on extreme ocean depths and the effects of the Gulf Stream, which can combine to quickly erase all evidence of plane crashes and shipwrecks.

Paranormal explanations

Triangle writers have used a number of supernatural concepts to explain the events. One explanation pins the blame on leftover technology from the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. Sometimes connected to the Atlantis story is the submerged rock formation known as the Bimini Road off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, which is in the Triangle by some definitions. Followers of the purported psychic Edgar Cayce take his prediction that evidence of Atlantis would be found in 1968, as referring to the discovery of the Bimini Road. Believers describe the formation as a road, wall, or other structure, but the Bimini Road is of natural origin.
Some hypothesize that a parallel universe exists in the Bermuda Triangle region, causing a time/space warp that sucks the objects around it into a parallel universe. Others attribute the events to UFOs. Charles Berlitz, author of various books on anomalous phenomena, lists several theories attributing the losses in the Triangle to anomalous or unexplained forces.

Natural explanations

Compass variations

Compass problems are one of the cited phrases in many Triangle incidents. While some have theorized that unusual local magnetic anomalies may exist in the area, such anomalies have not been found. Compasses have natural magnetic variations in relation to the magnetic poles, a fact which navigators have known for centuries. Magnetic (compass) north and geographic (true) north are exactly the same only for a small number of places – for example, as of 2000, in the United States, only those places on a line running from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico. But the public may not be as informed, and think there is something mysterious about a compass “changing” across an area as large as the Triangle, which it naturally will.

Gulf Stream

The Gulf Stream is a major surface current, primarily driven by thermohaline circulation that originates in the Gulf of Mexico and then flows through the Straits of Florida into the North Atlantic. In essence, it is a river within an ocean, and, like a river, it can and does carry floating objects. It has a maximum surface velocity of about 2 m/s (6.6 ft/s). A small plane making a water landing or a boat having engine trouble can be carried away from its reported position by the current.

Human error

One of the most cited explanations in official inquiries as to the loss of any aircraft or vessel is human error. Human stubbornness may have caused businessman Harvey Conover to lose his sailing yacht, Revonoc, as he sailed into the teeth of a storm south of Florida on January 1, 1958.

Violent weather

Hurricanes are powerful storms that form in tropical waters and have historically cost thousands of lives and caused billions of dollars in damage. The sinking of Francisco de Bobadilla’s Spanish fleet in 1502 was the first recorded instance of a destructive hurricane. These storms have in the past caused a number of incidents related to the Triangle. Many Atlantic hurricanes pass through the Triangle as they recurve off the Eastern Seaboard, and, before the advent of weather satellite, ships often had little to no warning of a hurricane’s approach.

A powerful downdraft of cold air was suspected to be a cause in the sinking of Pride of Baltimore on May 14, 1986. The crew of the sunken vessel noted the wind suddenly shifted and increased velocity from 32 km/h (20 mph) to 97–145 km/h (60–90 mph). A National Hurricane Center satellite specialist, James Lushine, stated “during very unstable weather conditions the downburst of cold air from aloft can hit the surface like a bomb, exploding outward like a giant squall line of wind and water.” A similar event occurred to Concordia in 2010, off the coast of Brazil. Scientists are currently investigating whether “hexagonal” clouds may be the source of these up-to-170 mph (270 km/h) “air bombs”.

Methane hydrates

An explanation for some of the disappearances has focused on the presence of large fields of methane hydrates (a form of natural gas) on the continental shelves. Laboratory experiments carried out in Australia have proven that bubbles can, indeed, sink a scale model ship by decreasing the density of the water; any wreckage consequently rising to the surface would be rapidly dispersed by the Gulf Stream. It has been hypothesized that periodic methane eruptions (sometimes called “mud volcanoes”) may produce regions of frothy water that are no longer capable of providing adequate buoyancy for ships. If this were the case, such an area forming around a ship could cause it to sink very rapidly and without warning.
Publications by the USGS describe large stores of undersea hydrates worldwide, including the Blake Ridge area, off the coast of the southeastern United States. However, according to the USGS, no large releases of gas hydrates are believed to have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle for the past 15,000 years.

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