Scientists Investigating Patches of Ocean With Otherworldly Glow

We're inching ever closer towards unearthing the secrets behind one of the most enduring marine mysteries: the fabled "milky seas" — glowing stretches of water that cast the ocean in an otherworldly haze of green and white, spanning to the horizon and beyond. The nocturnal phenomenon has haunted and mystified sailors for centuries. But they're incredibly rare, and scientists have struggled to determine what causes them. The milky seas are believed to be produced by some form of bioluminescence, but by what creature? To learn more, researchers have created a database of every recorded sighting over the past 400 years, in the hope of predicting when and where the next display will pop up. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Earth and Space Science, by teasing out an underlying pattern to the phenomenon, the effort could provide scientists a chance to observe the milky seas and collect samples that have so far eluded them. "It is really hard to study something if you ha ... Read full article.