The third and final part of the article from the cycle MARE TENEBRARUM!
The imagination of cartographers from the XV – XVIII centuries was inhabited by the unseen ocean monsters: giant fish, sea snakes, monstrous whales that can swallow a small ship, enormous octopi… In the centuries that followed science has delivered its verdict, saying that there were no monsters in the depths of the sea there. There are sharks that would like to profit from the unwary bather or victim of a shipwreck, there is a giant squid, whose bodies have from time to time drifted ashore, there are deadly poisonous jellyfish, huge sperm whales, the whaling ships smashing at one blow gigantic tail… it’s all there, but monsters – no. However, the “monster” – a loose concept. Maybe you should look for monsters not only the fauna?
Imagine the scene: a hot day somewhere in the Equatorial part of the Pacific coast, beach, blazhenstvuya on the beach, gentle ocean, slowly rolling waves on the white sand… And suddenly in the middle of this idyll starts to happen something strange: sea starts to recede. The water’s edge is rapidly removed, exposing the piles of seaweed. It’s surprising and a little disturbing but trouble nothing compared to the opportunity to wander around the exposed rock pools, collect shells and catch crabs flailing in bewilderment. Only confuse sea birds, for some reason with the frightened cries of flying away from the sea, a suspicious white stripe on the horizon… When you hear a thundering sound and see that the white band has become in the rapidly approaching huge foam roller may be too late. Monster called tsunami, rapidly unleash all his destructive power on the coastline, destroying coastal buildings with a ferocity that exceeds the ferocity of any kaiju.
Tsunami… this is a monster shot and written a lot. A giant wave appears in many films: “Death of Japan” (Ciro Moritani, 1974), “deep impact” (Mimi Leder, 1998), “2012” (Roland Emmerich, 2009), Pompeii (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2014), a relatively new Norwegian film “the Wave” (roar of Uthaug, 2015) and the film Kimble Randall “3D Tsunami” (by the way, the only “real” horror on this list for in it, besides the waves, there are young people in a confined space, a maniac and a white shark), and many others. But none of these movies can cause such horror, what experience when viewing documentary photos taken during the “Christmas tsunami” in South-East Asia on 26 December 2004 that claimed almost 300 000 lives, and the tsunami that struck Japan in March of 2011 (the number of victims was closer to 20 000). Reasons that can give rise to these deadly waves several. The main shifts of the earth’s crust in the deep part of the ocean. They often occur on the boundaries of the interaction of oceanic and continental lithospheric plates. For example, the Pacific and the Eurasian and Australian (80% of tsunamis occur in the Western Pacific ocean). But, in addition, a tsunami can be generated by a huge undersea landslide. (It was a landslide (though triggered by nuclear explosions) generates a tsunami that destroys refugee camps on the coast of North America in the novel, Peter watts ‘ “starfish”.) In the narrow and deep into the land of the fjords, a dangerous wave may cause the glacier. Also, theoretically, a tsunami will occur when a drop in the ocean a large celestial body. However, a recent mathematical model showed that a giant tsunami will occur if a large meteorite falls near the coast, because in the remote deep-water area, most of the energy will be converted into steam.
However, tsunami is known to all who have not skipped geography lessons. But on the next monster of the water element not known to many. Moreover, even the scientific community has recognized the existence of these monsters recently – in the mid 90-ies of XX century. I’m talking about the waves of killers.
So, imagine that you are on Board (though it will be a modern cruise liner) during the storm. Ocean storm, even from the shore – a spectacle, resulting in awe and from the ship – and all evoke an ancient feeling of human helplessness before the forces of nature. But your ship is not afraid of even the ten-meter waves, you stand somewhere on the covered deck in the warmth, dryness and comfort, with delight and a sinking heart looking as the nose cuts up topped with caps of foam rollers. For you, it is something like attraction-a spooky, but safe… But what is it? Right at the rate grows grey wall two to three times higher than the highest waves. Where did it come from? Who built a wall in the middle of the ocean? It moves! Heading straight for you! Maybe it’s the Great Sea Serpent showed his back or the God of the sea Poseidon stretched forth his hand? You will not believe your eyes, intently stare… the blood run from the horror: is not this incredible, monstrous wave. The same killer wave. It is enormous. It is the height of the liner. It is getting closer and closer. Here it is already blotted out the sky. Right in front of her deep depression. The ship lurches sharply on the nose, drops down, as the trailer on a roller coaster, and then… and then what one Dagon known.
As I mentioned, twenty years ago to testimonies of encounters with water monsters being treated as a seafaring tales, like descriptions of encounters with the Flying Dutchman. The fact that according to existing theory, the occurrence of waves higher than 15 meters was considered possible not more often than once in ten thousand years. Opinion of the scientific community changed radically in 1995, when 26-foot wave hit the Norwegian oil platform in the North sea. The event was documented, and subsequent satellite monitoring showed that these monsters appear in different parts of the oceans every few days. But where do they come from? Experiments have shown that from time to time there is a wave that can “steal” energy from its neighbors and thus increasing their power. If so, then the occurrence of freak waves with an absolutely calm sea, as shown in the movie Poseidon (Wolfgang Petersen, 2006), of course, unlikely, but in a storm – easily.
Here is how described the meeting with such a monster in the novel by Lothar-günther Bucheim “Boat”:
Wave like the back of a giant whale, rises a little to the side in the course of the boat. It becomes more and more, straightens his hump and turns into a wall. Then its surface becomes concave, and the shaft, shimmering like green glass, rushes straight at us. And here is the bow of the boat slams into the wall.
— Now gone — was worth the second watch officer to start his sentence, as a wave hits the conning tower. The boat swayed.
— no sense — telling the proposal’s second a minute later.
I know of cases where the entire carrier team at full strength washed away from the bridge is particularly powerful wave, and no one inside the boat were not aware of the incident. These deadly waves sometimes are born, if one shaft rolls on the other. The impact of such a giant will not sustain any safety belt.
I believe that these monsters are to blame for the mysterious disappearances of large ships. Killer wave could easily break in half a freighter, a container ship or a huge tanker, as shown in the recently released film “sound of storm” (Craig Gillespie, 2016), based, among other things, on real events.
Want to look at monsters? Rummage on the Internet – footage of real waves are not numerous, but they are. There are documentaries where you can hear expert opinion and to see the results of laboratory studies and mathematical modeling. Well, or revise the Perfect storm by Wolfgang Petersen (2000) – scene of the death of the fishing vessel “Andrea Gail”.
The maelstrom, the legendary Homer’s Charybdis is another horrible product of the sea, familiar to anyone who read “the Overthrow in the Maelstrom” By Edgar Allan PoE or “20 000 leagues under the sea” by Jules Verne. So, contact At:
… I heard a loud, growing roar, like the roar of the great herds of Buffalo in American plains; at the same moment I noticed that these bursts of the sea, or, as sailors say, “chaff”, rapidly went into a rapid current, which swept to the East. In front of me… this current acquired a monstrous velocity. In about five minutes the whole sea to Varga have ran red-hot through the irresistible rage, but most of all it has raged between the mosquito and the shore. Here water expanse, rugged, etruscana thousands of counterflows, suddenly vestibules in violent convulsions, hissing, bubbling, whistling, whirling spiral in countless giant funnel and swirl rushed to the East with such unimaginable speed with which it can be brought down only waterfall off a mountain cliff.
After another five minutes the whole picture had again changed beyond recognition. The surface of the sea became more smooth, funnel one after another disappeared, but there was a huge strip of foam, which previously did not exist. These bands grew, covering a huge space, and merging with one another, absorbed the rotational movement of the settled whirlpools, as if he is ready to become a hotbed of a new, more extensive. Unexpectedly — very unexpectedly — he had suddenly made it abundantly clear and distinct circle, the diameter of which, perhaps, exceed half a mile. This whirlpool was surrounded by the wide strip of glittering foam; but not a single piece of this foam did not fly into the jaws of a monstrous crater: the inside of it, how it could spread opinion, was a smooth, shiny, black, as agate, a water wall with a slope to the horizon at an angle of about forty-five degrees, which was spinning wildly rapid convulsive jerks and filled the air so heartbreaking howling — not a scream, not a roar — even the mighty falls of Niagara have never wosilait to heaven.
The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock wavered. I pressed his face to the ground in unspeakable disarray clung to the scrubby grass.
So. Edgar, in turn, quotes the description of a monstrous maelstrom of the Jonas Ramus, Norwegian historian, who lived at the turn of XVII-XVIII centuries According to him, the Maelstrom simply sucks yachts, schooners and larger vessels and whales, “and it is impossible to describe their frantic bellowing and roar when they are trying in vain to swim…” the Horror and only. Even the mighty “Nautilus” with great difficulty overcame the enormous power of the water vortex. What kind of monster Maelstrom? and so if it’s bad? The website dic.academic.ru the first tells us that Maelstrom is a system of whirlpools in the Strait between the Islands of föhr and Moscenica, and further that no giant funnel, sucking the ships, of course, is not formed. The whirlpool is a hazard only for small malomanevrennoe vessels that can be broken on the rocks. In addition to this vortex in the North of Norway there is the maelstrom of Saltstraumen, and in Japan – a whirlpool of Naruto. If you are not lazy and will look for the Network video of any of these water vortices is likely to be disappointed – nothing like the monstrous funnel, like the one that spun the nymph Calypso in the third part “pirates of Caribbean sea”, you will not see.
And in the cold waters of the North Atlantic or the southern ocean towards us can swim the darkness of the night another monster iceberg. Everyone knows that this ice mountain, a breakaway from the glacier of Greenland, brought death to the Titanic April night in 1912. But in our days the icebergs pose a serious threat to ships. Watched the movie “Icebreaker” (Nikolai Khomeriki, 2016) remember the slowly but inexorably approaching deadly “semen Semyonitch” to stuck in the ice the ship.
But, to sail away from the shore, to avoid the fury of the tsunami, and dive on in to shelter from violent winds, icebergs and mountains similarity of the waves? There, in the depth where there is everlasting peace? About modern oceanographers know that the idea of the sea as the realm of eternal peace, is fatally flawed! But even if you are faced with a riot of underwater currents, you will meet two monsters. The names of them – the Pressure and Cold.
Pressure… an invisible force, with the inexorability of industrial press squashing anyone who dares to penetrate into Poseidonos possession. Under water the pressure increases by 1 bar (approximately 1 atmosphere) for every ten meters deep; at the bottom of the Mariana trench his power is truly monstrous is 1100 times greater than at sea level. It crushes the solid hull of submarines as empty cans of beer. Remember the scene of the death of the nuclear submarine “Montana” in the beginning kameronovskoy “the Abyss” (1989)? Or, as in the same film covered with a spiderweb of cracked glass, lost control and falling into the chute of the apparatus with the villain inside?
“But it does not have to be saved from the destructive forces of the pressure inside a thick steel or titanium shell!” – perhaps you will object. – “Because you can just create in manned submersibles (and, respectively, inside the body) the same pressure as the outside!” Logical? At first glance – Yes. It is so organized accommodation of divers at deepwater stations in most underwater horror: in the previously mentioned “the Abyss” and “Leviathan” (George pan Cosmatos, 1989), “Deep Star 6” (Sean Cunningham, 1989), “Deep blue sea” (Renny Harlin, 1998) and “Sphere” (Barry Levinson, 1998)… But you have to understand that the depth and the real depth of the movie, things are different. Stubborn facts tell us this:
1) scuba diving, filled with ordinary compressed air, it is safe only up to 30 meters. Deeper, there comes a condition called narcosis. Man becomes inadequate that when diving is deadly dangerous.
2) If we want to dive deeper than 30 metres, you need to use the “heliocom” – a mixture of oxygen and helium. But with him, we will be able to sink no deeper than 200 to 250 metres.
3) “Trimix” of oxygen-helium-nitrogen gas mix, allowing real conditions to dive to 450 meters, and in experiments up to 600 m, But not more. Dive to great depths in diving equipment simply impossible.
That is, when the film shows us some underwater station, located in the ocean many kilometers deep, which is maintained at a pressure equal to the ambient pressure, do NOT BELIEVE!
But the pressure of a monster is not just dangerous, it is also treacherous! If you try to escape from his grasp, he’ll attack you in the back. A mortal blow. Imagine the situation: your underwater camera for some reason cannot emerge, and to the surface several tens of meters. No rescue equipment on Board, and your only chance of survival is to try to swim by yourself, holding his breath. In this case, assume that the pressure inside the apparatus equals the ambient pressure, so open the hatch and go outside the big challenges is not. (Precisely the same situation and got the divers in the film, Ron Scalpello “Dangerous dive” (2015). By the way, the original title of the film – “The Pressure”, that is “Pressure”.) So, to stay alive, you on the whole way up you need to exhale continuously, otherwise the air trapped in the lungs expands and starts to pop the alveoli and small blood vessels, including brain blood vessels. Of course, in reality it will not be as dramatic as in the “Deep Star” where one of the characters literally tore with a rapid ascent, but just as deadly.
And the bends? Occupational disease of divers, resulting from the fact that during the ascent without decompression dissolved in the blood nitrogen “boil”, bubbles clog the capillaries, impairing the nutrition of the tissues and resulting in severe pain in the joints and further necrosis.
Well, the pressure is more or less clear, so move on to another monster of the seas – cold. It was he, not sharks, giant squids, and poisonous jellyfish, the main killer shipwrecked. The thermal conductivity of water is 25 times higher than air. If the temperature is below +20°C, the human body inevitably begins to lose heat. At a temperature of +5° hypothermia occurs within 30 minutes, at 0° – 15 min, and an hour and a half, comes death. Remember the scene from “Titanic” (James Cameron, 1996) with the mass of bodies in life jackets! Moreover, the cold like a true monster, killing in different ways. Can kill instantly if the person caught in the icy water, the shock will start an arrhythmia and his heart stopped. Can make torment, gradually depriving the human body heat. And maybe even give hope for salvation – and still kill. In the history of Maritime disasters many cases when a shipwrecked fish out of water, lifted on Board the vessel, and in this moment, when seemingly all the troubles behind, he was dying. The reason: the body changes position from horizontal to vertical, there is blood flow in the lower limb, this leads to a sharp cooling of the pericardium and cardiac arrest.
It should be remembered that the depths of the ocean, the Kingdom not only eternal darkness, but eternal cold. Below 400 meters, the water temperature does not exceed 0… +2 degrees, no matter which climate zone you are under the Arctic ice or on the equator. And sometimes it so happens that both monster and Pressure Cold (and with them, Darkness and Despair) – combined. View mentioned two paragraphs above “crash dive”! In the film, there is large-scale scenes and impressive special effects, but if you want to understand the feelings of people caught up in the thrall of the Abyss, the picture is definitely for you.
Potential authors of an underwater horror, not wanting to admit embarrassing mistakes, and for anyone interested in the physiological aspects of stay at depth or in ice water (and also in the mountains, in heat and even in space), recommend the book by Frances Ashcroft “On the brink: the science of survival” (published in the land of OOO “Alpina non-fiction” 2015).
I do not want to inflate the size of the article, therefore, only briefly mention the phenomenon of parent which is also the Ocean, but which still largely belong to the air element, rather than to water.
First, it is hurricanes (typhoons). A real hurricane, which originated in tropical latitudes, this is not what happened in Moscow on may 29 this year. No, this is a huge atmospheric vortex diameter below 1000 km, the air rotates at a speed greater than 30 m/s. Wind not only fells trees, takes down billboards and light construction, but also drives the water to the shore, causing flooding of large areas. Storms take hundreds of lives, not only in countries like the Philippines or Haiti, where a huge part of the population lives in dilapidated shacks, but in a completely developed economic, what an example – Katrina, the strongest in U.S. history, stopuri 80% of the territory of New Orleans and killed over 1,800 people (the traces of destruction can be seen in the first season of”true detective”).
Secondly, it is a mysterious phenomenon called a white squall. Its essence is that under a clear sky and without any signs of the storm begins to blow strong wind, billowing waves, crowned with caps of white foam. In 1986, from a sudden attack of this monster sank a 42-metre schooner “Pride of Baltimore”, and of the death of the other schooner “Albatross” in 1961 – a film by Ridley Scott. The film is called “White squall” (1996).
Thirdly, water tornadoes, descending to the surface of the sea of storm-cloud like the tentacles of Cthulhu. Yes, water tornadoes never reach such a size and such a destructive force as a tornado somewhere in the Great plains, their appearance is not accompanied by Gale-force winds, and the lifetime does not exceed 20 – 30 minutes. But they can cause a lot of troubles. If you’ve ever been in Matsesta, must have seen what was left of the medical building of the sanatorium, which in 1991 was flooded with streams of mud coming from the Black sea tornado.
I completed my review of sea of monsters. The ocean is still not explored more than 5%, its always hidden in the dark depths conceal a lot of mysteries and future discoveries. In addition, let’s not forget about the changing climate: global warming trend continues, melt the polar ice caps, increases the rate of descent of the glaciers, leading to the appearance of giant icebergs, changing the direction of movement of air masses, increasing the strength of hurricanes… and who knows what other monsters (in the broadest sense of the word) can generate these vast water?!…
Afterword.
Did not load article unnecessary “science”. I think that anyone who is interested in the mechanisms of the freak waves, maelstroms, tsunamis, impact on the body high blood pressure and other things, easily be able to find information on the Internet.
MARE TENEBRARUM. Part 1
MARE TENEBRARUM. Part 2
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