Milky Seas From Atlas Obscura
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Yo, ho, ho, yo, ho, ho, hey you salty sea dogs, hello, ho, ho, hi. This is Terrestrials, I am Lulu, and I'm singing in a subpar impression of a sailor because today's story takes place at sea, on a boat.

It's about something that for centuries people thought was a tall tale, something sailors would occasionally spot out in the waves like mermaids or the Loch Ness Monster. But most people on the land didn't think it was real.

Until one day, in the recent past, a new kind of technology, a satellite in the sky taking pictures and collecting data, was able to solve the case. It's a beautiful tale about this Earth, and it comes to us from our friends over at the Atlas Obscura podcast.

We wanted to share their work today because like us, they make a podcast that is all about cool stories that take place on this earth. Neat animals, neat places, things you might not have heard about that make this planet feel a little more alive and wondrous. So this is a great one. It is literally sparkling with delight. And I will say no more except to hand it off to their host, Dylan Turris. Here we go.

Like all good sea stories, this one starts on a dark night aboard a big ship hundreds of miles out to sea. John Briand, the captain of an oil tanker called the SS Lima, and his wife Brenda were standing up on the deck. It was such a lovely evening. We were actually just taking some time out, chatting with the officer of the watch and just enjoying what was a particularly calm night. And there was no moon. I remember that. There was no moon.

The Lima was sailing south through the Arabian Sea. There was no land in sight, just glassy water rippling softly in every direction, all on a dark and moonless night. And that is when one of the officers spotted something on the horizon. The ship was sailing towards a strange bluish-whitish glow emanating up from the surface of the water. Something on the horizon was getting brighter.

John had been a sea captain for more than a decade. He'd sailed around the world multiple times. He'd weathered major storms. He'd even motored over the face of a tsunami swell. But Captain John Brianne

had never seen anything like this. It was bright. I mean, it lit things up. Once you were in it, I would say you could probably read a newspaper with some decent print on it. Wow. I'm Dylan Therese, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're going in search of that otherworldly glow, looking for these gigantic swaths of bioluminescence that radiate up from the surface of the sea over thousands of square miles. For one night in January 1995, Captain John Brand and the SS Lima sailed into these luminous waters, gliding through a white glowing ocean for hours on end until these mysterious waters finally faded away, not to be seen again.

At least, not until an inquisitive satellite scientist stumbled onto the case. More after the break. In 2004, a group of meteorologists were meeting at a conference on the west coast of the United States. Well, I'm Steve Miller, not the famous one, unfortunately. But I work here at Colorado State University as a

Steve's a satellite guy. For decades, he's been using satellites to study the Earth's atmosphere, first at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and now at Colorado State University. Do you have a favorite satellite?

Do I have a favorite satellite? Oh, boy, I'm going to get in trouble with my sponsors if I answer wrong here. Actually, I do. The satellites that carry the day-night band are the ones that are closest to my heart. And back in 2004, at this meteorological conference, Steve and his colleagues were learning about some new cutting-edge satellite technology, including what would become Steve's favorite kind of sensor, the day-night band.

And these new sensors were going to be able to take incredibly high quality images of the Earth from space, even at night, with almost no visible light. I was at a meeting with a few colleagues and we had this kind of lunchtime discussion, you know, thinking outside of the box. And, you know, the topic of bioluminescence came up. Bioluminescence, that's light emitted by bacteria and animals. If you've ever seen a firefly before, you've seen bioluminescence.

And in the ocean, bioluminescence is incredibly common. You might have even seen waves lighting up as they crash against the beach. That's the work of dinoflagellates, these little bioluminescent bacteria. But the light that bioluminescence gives off is generally pretty weak. So as Steve and his colleagues were chatting around the lunch table, kind of BSing about what these new day-night band satellites might be able to pick up,

They wondered if these satellite sensors would be powerful enough to pick up bioluminescence from space. But we really didn't have a good answer for that. It was just kind of throwing it out there. And then after the meeting is when I went online and started looking around to try to, you know, look for different kinds of bioluminescence that may or may not be able to be seen by these new satellites. And that's when I came across a website...

A website about bioluminescence. And on this website, Steve Miller found an unusual excerpt from a Siemens report. It was almost a decade old, and it had been submitted to the Marine Observer by the captain of an oil tanker called the SS Lima, Captain John Brienne. He says, at 1800 universal time...

on a clear, moonless night. There was no moon. I remember that. There was no moon. A whitish glow was observed on the horizon. And after 15 minutes of steaming, the ship was completely surrounded by a sea of milky white color with a fairly uniform luminescence. The bioluminescence appeared to cover the entire sea area from horizon to horizon. And I mean, it was just from horizon to horizon. It appeared as though the ship was sailing over a field of snow or gliding over the clouds.

Amazingly black against the white water.

And that's the end of it. It's a strangely poetic entry in a ship log. Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think that people... To Steve, this sounded too good to be true. Because this wasn't ordinary bioluminescence. This definitely wasn't dinoflagellates crashing on the beach. This patch of glowing water was inexplicably gigantic. Steaming through something for six hours, this must be a pretty large...

area of glowing water, maybe large enough to be seen from space. Steve wanted to know more. As it turned out, although there was almost nothing in the scientific literature, sailors had been writing about this for a long, long time. They'd even given the phenomena a name. These things are called milky seas. And upon more digging, you find that these events, fantastic as they are, they've been reported to

by vessels in the Northwest Indian Ocean and the oceans around Java.

in Indonesia for centuries now. The Milky Seas turn up in some prominent works of seafaring fiction. Both Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea reference these huge glowing patches of water. And Charles Darwin even wrote about seeing one as he sailed around South America. Steve found a professor in England who'd compiled all of these references in one report, and there were well over 200 of them.

But despite all of this sailor lore, scientifically, no one really knew anything about them. It's been more part of the folklore of mariners and science fiction than it has been part of scientific knowledge up to this point.

So it's kind of exciting to come across something like that and think, well, now we have perhaps a means to go and look for one of these things. And now we have a report from the Lima that's telling us exactly where and when one of these was sighted. Unlike the sea captains who came before him, Steve Miller didn't have to sail every inch of the ocean

hoping to happen on a milky sea. Steve was a satellite guy, and he had Captain John Brienne's exact coordinates from the SS Lima in 1995. It was relatively early for this kind of nighttime satellite imagery, and it would be using old technology, and the resolution would be pretty terrible.

But Steve thought that maybe, just maybe, there might have been a satellite passing over that spot where John Briand and his crew had sailed the Milky Seas a decade earlier. Steve started searching through old satellite records. It was, to be honest, kind of a Hail Mary. There's, you know, a lot of considerations in terms of, well, is this a date when the satellite was passing over that area? Was it, you know, the right conditions of light in the sky?

A satellite had to be in the right position. It had to have the right kind of sensor. Even small amounts of light, like the moon being out, would be bright enough to drown out the Milky Sea. But Steve Miller got lucky. There was a satellite overhead on that night. It happened to have a low-light sensor that could take decent images in the dark. And as Captain John mentioned, it just so happened to be a moonless, cloudless night. And so now...

Almost 10 years after a satellite had snapped that picture, Professor Steve Miller was staring at that very square of ocean on his computer screen. I really didn't see anything at first. In fact, it showed really just what looked like a fingerprint smudge on the monitor. But when I grabbed the box that the image was plotted within and I dragged it across the screen to go do something else, I noticed that the smudge moved with it.

And it was I moved it back and the smudge moved again up and down, left and right. And so it was part of the image. In other words, that smudge containing the S.S. Lima was 15000 square kilometers. It was a smudge the size of Connecticut. Then it was glowing. The Milky Seas were real and they were absolutely enormous. Do you remember sort of your emotion when you when you realized that this wasn't a smudge?

Yeah, I still do. And in fact, as you were asking the question, it almost replayed the tingle up my back going up to the base of my skull. And I realized that, you know, I was seeing something that was tied back to all of this folklore and these reports that

We were never truly sure whether these were just wild tales told by seafarers over the centuries who had too much whiskey on board or something, and they just were trying to make life interesting. But yeah, I mean, it was very exciting. Do you remember who you told first? I ran down the hallway to try to tell my boss, Jeff Hawkins. He wasn't in his office, and so I immediately went over to...

his boss and his boss's boss in the other building and told them. Steve's a scientist at heart. His work involves a lot of precision and math and a kind of non-romantic rationality. But he still can't deny the vast cosmic wonder of the Milky Seas. Something out of 20,000 leagues under the sea,

seen glowing from a thousand miles above the Earth. And even in the scientific writing around this, I find myself sometimes, you know, gravitating towards more colorful writing because it's just such a, you know, inspiring and exciting thing. It's always kind of a nice epiphany to realize that there's things right here on our own home planet that we still don't truly understand and kind of mysteries on our own planet. We don't always have to look way out to the depths of space and the cosmos to find these fascinating things.

It was almost 20 years ago that Steve found that smudge and fell in love with the romance of the Milky Seas. Since then, Steve's been on the search for more of them. He's become the satellite and bioluminescence guy. And he's famous for his work on those day-night band satellites. People have kind of made fun of my name and called it, well, it's the Steve Miller band now. So I guess that's what I get out of all of this.

Over the years, Steve Miller and his band have had some huge breakthroughs. The first time Steve spotted the Milky Seas, it was a moment of wild good fortune. He just happened to go looking and stumbled onto an image of an astounding and unexplored scientific phenomenon. It was his moment of inspiration. The last 17 years have been perspiration, figuring out how to find these things without a ship's report.

And less than a year ago, in 2021, Steve and his team published a paper about how to filter out this extraneous glowing light that's given off by the atmosphere. And using this technology, he and his team have successfully identified multiple examples of Milky Seas. And they were able to see these on satellite images in real time. They were the ones who spotted them from satellites, not from a ship.

But even though Steve's been able to capture the Milky Seas via satellite multiple times now, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about them. Why and how do they form? What are the bacteria that create them feeding on? How deep do they go? Just how many bacteria even congregate in them?

Unlike other bioluminescent bacteria, the bacteria that they think make up the Milky Seas, Vibrio harvii, they don't glow on their own. Instead, they do something called quorum sensing. And they only start to glow when they sense that the group has gotten big enough. For that to happen, it takes about 100 million bacteria per cubic centimeter of water. Think about how many cubic centimeters of water are in a patch of ocean the size of Connecticut. Steve's done the math.

There are more bacteria in the Milky Seas than there are stars in the universe. Did finding the Milky Seas sort of change the way you thought about the world at all? You know, it's exciting. I don't think that we've gotten to the point where we feel we understand these things. I just think that there's a lot more to be done. So I don't want to sit on my laurels at this point and just think about, you know, how great it was, you know, to have done this. I think that I'm still very much in the active phase of trying to learn more.

Does some part of you wish you could go and sail across the Milky Seas yourself? Oh, absolutely. I think that's my life goal at this point. Your life goal is to sail across the Milky Seas? Oh, I'd love to do that, yeah. And it would be great with the new generation of satellites if we could spot one. And given that they do tend to occur over multi-day times...

kind of form a SWAT team, if you will, to get out to one of those and sample it. And, you know, in my case, maybe just swim in it. Who knows? I want to give a huge thanks to Steve Miller for telling me about his work.

searching for the milky seas. I've talked to him a couple of times over the past few years, and it is always just an absolute delight. I hope that he gets to swim in the milky seas, and I hope I can come with him. I also want to thank Steve Haddock, who is a marine biologist, who also worked on this research and took me out on a boat to see bioluminescence, but I think that is a story for another day.

Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Witness Docs. This episode was produced by Sarah Wyman. The production team includes Doug Baldinger, Camille Stanley, Willis Ryder Arnold, Manolo Morales, Gianna Palmer, Tracy Samuelson, John Delore, Casey Holford, Peter Clowney. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Chris Naka. Our theme and end credit music is by Sam Tindall.

I'm Dylan Thuris, wishing you all the wonder in the world. I will see you soon. Witness Docs from Stitcher.

All right, that'll do it for today. Lulu here again, reminding you that if you liked today's story, go check out the Atlas Obscura podcast. They've got new stories coming out every day, little 15-minute bursts of daily wonder, fascinating places, mind-blowing stories. And you can find it by searching for the Atlas Obscura podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.

or going to atlasobscura.com slash podcast. Check them out. They are truly wonderful. Catch you in a couple spins, this dirty old planet of ours.