Top 10 Unsolved Deep Ocean Mysteries
#10: The Mary Celeste
Top 10 Mysteries That Will Probably NEVER Be Solved
In 1872, the merchant ship Mary Celeste was found adrift near the Azores Islands. It was in good condition with plenty of supplies and cargo, but the entire crew had disappeared. The sole lifeboat was gone, suggesting that the crew had abandoned ship on purpose. There are myriad theories, but modern investigators have doubted most of them: there was no reason for a mutiny and no evidence of an attack. Some NOW believe that faulty instruments on the ship led the crew to believe both that they were near dry land and that the ship could be sinking - neither of which may have been true. Since none of the crew ever turned up, we’ll likely never know the full story.
#9: The 1968 Submarines
Top 20 Deep Sea Mysteries That Will Freak You Out
In the first half of 1968, four submarines mysteriously went missing. They were the Israeli submarine “Dakar”, the French sub “Minerve”, the Soviet sub “K-129”, and finally in May, the USS Scorpion. We now know the locations of all four submarines, with the “Minerve” discovered in 2019. It’s deeply unlikely that the disappearances are connected, but four powerful submarines all vanishing in the space of six months is confounding. It’s still not known for sure why any of the submarines sank, either. There was even a top-secret CIA operation to recover the wreckage of K-129 without the USSR knowing, though the government claims that this was largely unsuccessful.
#8: The White Shark Café
Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries Across America
These fearsome predators usually live in coastal regions, which is how contact with humans has earned them their reputation for danger. But great white sharks regularly travel far away from the coasts to a so-called “ocean void” in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and for decades, scientists had no idea why. Research from 2018 suggests that the sharks are going there to regularly feed on small organisms, which you’d think would be the end of the story. However, there’s another layer: it’s really on the male sharks that actively dive for food in the café, and researchers still don’t know why the females don’t join in, nor do they know why the males only dive like this here.
#7: The Mariana Trench
Top 10 Mysterious Ocean Secrets
Almost 36,000 feet below sea level, in the heart of the Mariana Trench, you’ll find Challenger Deep, the deepest known part of the ocean. But we still have a lot to learn about Challenger Deep and the Mariana Trench. You’ll often hear it said that we know more about outer space than we do about the deep ocean, because only 5% of the ocean has been explored. This isn’t EXACTLY true, and the statistic really means that only 5% of the ocean has been mapped in great detail; though, in 2023, it was reported that this had risen to almost 25%. Still, the deep sea is treacherous and immensely difficult to study, full of questions we don’t even know to ask yet.
#6: The Milky Sea Phenomenon
Top 10 Unsolved Internet Mysteries
Witnessed by humans for years, it wasn’t until 2005 that we caught tangible evidence of this phenomenon on camera. But milky seas happen all over Earth, and scientists are still studying them in-depth to try and understand exactly what they are. Essentially, seawater will sometimes start to glow vividly, and with the invention of satellites, we’ve finally been able to photograph the milky seas. It’s believed that the glow is caused by bioluminescent bacteria dying near the surface. But there’s still so much we don’t know, like what, exactly, triggers a milky sea to occur, since so many bacteria need to die at the same time for it to happen.
#5: The Giant Squid
Top 10 UNSOLVED Reddit Mysteries
Like the milky sea, it wasn’t until very recently that we captured living giant squid on camera. We’ve known they existed for centuries because of sailors’ stories and dead squid washing up on beaches, but they remained extremely elusive, with the first images of a living squid being taken in 2002. They live at extreme depths and are very hard to find and observe even today, and we don’t know definitively how big they can actually grow. The squid has been blamed for the myth of the kraken, too, though there’s no conclusive evidence that a giant squid, specifically, has attacked a human. But we still have shockingly little information about these giant ocean-dwellers.
#4: The Yonaguni Monument
4 Most Bizarre Discoveries in the Deep Sea | Unveiled
Sometimes nicknamed “Japan’s Atlantis”, the Yonaguni Monument has been baffling people for years. It was discovered in 1987, and has captured public interest ever since because it looks like a manmade structure. Some credible researchers, notably the geologist Masaaki Kimura, have said exactly that. However, other researchers have said that, though the monument looks strange, it’s a wholly natural piece of geology created by normal erosion. They’ve also pointed out that if it IS a city, it’s exceptionally small, only 165 feet long. But its distinct appearance makes it popular with divers and people who wonder if it might be something more.
#3: The Baltic Sea Anomaly
100 Unsolved Mysteries
This unusual object is popularly latched onto by people looking for evidence of aliens. It appears in a sonar image published in 2011, and has been widely noted to look a lot like the Millennium Falcon – or, perhaps like Pac-Man, depending on the angle. It’s one of the most famous examples of a USO, or “Unidentified Submerged Object”. No scientists believe that the object is a crashed spacecraft, but what it REALLY is hasn’t yet been definitively proven. Popular theories from researchers are that it’s a glacier deposit, meteorite, or volcanic rock, but it could also be a group of fish that looks particularly unusual on sonar.
#2: Bermeja
Is it possible for an entire island to disappear? According to some, yes, and that’s what happened to this small island off the coast of Mexico. Bermeja was drawn on maps of the region dating as far back as the Spanish conquest, but in the 21st century, renewed efforts to map the area in detail drew a blank. It looked like Bermeja, an island taken to exist, had disappeared. This is most likely a well-known example of the “phantom island” phenomenon, where errors in early voyages create false islands on maps. But there are those that believe Bermeja was a real island that could have disappeared if sea levels rose and submerged it, and that it’s being covered up by the CIA.
#1: The Bermuda Triangle
Top 10 Creepiest Unsolved Bermuda Triangle Mysteries
For decades, people have wondered why so many ships and planes seem to go missing in the Bermuda Triangle, this region of the Atlantic Ocean between Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico. Many of the vanishings, like those of Flight 19 and the USS Cyclops, have entered pop culture as modern mysteries. Researchers have pointed out that statistically, the Bermuda Triangle isn’t more dangerous than other parts of the sea, and that many of the disappearances happened during storms. However, it’s true that lots of those wrecks haven’t been found to this day, including all of the planes in Flight 19 and the Cyclops; the latter of which remains the largest non-combat loss of life the US Navy has ever seen. Let us know in the comments which mystery you hope gets solved first.
