Remarkable Luminous Phenomena in Nature by William R. Corliss

Three hundred years later Pliny the Elder described light-emitting species of mollusks, jellyfish and mushrooms, adding that the Black Forest of central Europe was rumored to glow with bioluminescent birds (such rumors, though often repeated, were unfortunately never confirmed).Īround 1370 Egyptian zoologist Al-Damiri included bioluminescent insects in his zoological dictionary. In the third century B.C.E., Aristotle noticed that if he struck the surface of the sea with a rod, the water sometimes produced a bright blue flash. Mentions of animal light appear in ancient poetry and songs from many cultures. Although it is one of the oldest subjects of scientific study, it is also among the most elusive. The cold radiance emitted by fireflies, some species of fungi and various sea creatures is called bioluminescence. Now, after combining dozens of historical reports with state-of-the-art satellite data, researchers are close to solving one of the ocean's most persistent mysteries-its vast, ephemeral displays of ghostly living light. Semmes's firsthand description is one of the earliest reliable accounts of such a sea, and it has become a valuable, though inadvertent, contribution to science. “The whole face of nature seemed changed, and with but little stretch of the imagination, the Alabama might have been conceived to be a phantom ship, lighted up by the sickly and unearthly glare of a phantom sea.” The Alabama traveled through the eerie water for several hours, finally exiting the patch as abruptly as it had entered it.

“Around the horizon there was a subdued glare, or flush, as though there were a distant illumination going on, whilst overhead there was a lurid, dark sky,” Semmes wrote.

“At about eight P.M., there being no moon, but the sky being clear, and the stars shining brightly, we suddenly passed from the deep blue water in which we had been sailing, into a patch of water so white that it startled me,” Semmes recounted in a memoir.Īt first he thought that the pale, constant glow indicated a submerged ridge, but a weighted line the crew dropped over the gunwale sank for 600 feet without hitting bottom.

Formidable pirates though they were, Captain Raphael Semmes and his crew were spooked by the sea they encountered that January evening. Civil War, weakening the Union by raiding its merchant ships. On January 30, 1864, the Confederate warship CSS Alabama entered what its captain described as a “remarkable patch of the sea.” The Alabama, sailing southwest along the Horn of Africa, was one of several Confederate vessels cruising the world's oceans during the U.S.

Remarkable Luminous Phenomena in Nature by William R. Corliss