A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
milky sea
A milky sea is a rare event in which a very large area of ocean glows a steady soft white at night, bright enough to read by and extending in some accounts over thousands of square miles. Unlike the flashing sparkle of disturbed plankton, the light is continuous and unbroken and does not respond to movement. It is produced by bacteria rather than by plankton, in concentrations nobody has satisfactorily explained.
Etymology
The English name comes from mariners’ accounts and is old, appearing in ships’ logs and in nineteenth-century natural history writing. Jules Verne describes one in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, taking the phenomenon from the accounts available to him, and sailors called them white waters and glowing seas as well.
Notes
For a long time these were treated as tall tales, since a single vessel might report one and nothing could be checked. Satellite instruments sensitive to very low light have now confirmed them, matching a 1995 sighting in the northwest Indian Ocean recorded by a British ship with a glow covering an area the size of a small country and lasting three nights. Only a handful have ever been photographed.