Kraken Rising

Many readers ask me about the underlying details in my novels — is the science real or fiction? Where do the situations, equipment, characters, or their expertise come from, and just how much of any legend has a basis in fact?

As in my previous novels, there is always the germ of a story, or legend, or… something. And in the case of the Kraken there are numerous seafaring tales dating back many centuries.

The Kraken is a legendary sea creature that was first said to dwell off the coasts of Norway and Greenland. The legend dates back as far as the late 13th century. An old Icelandic saga, Örvar-Oddr, tells of a journey to Helluland (Baffin Island), where a sailor sees the massive sea beast called Hafgufa. This is believed to be the first ever reference to the Kraken.

It wasn’t until 1735, that the Swedish botanist, Carolus Linnaeus, first classified the Kraken as a cephalopod in the first edition of his Systema Naturae, a taxonomic classification of all living things. From then on, its sightings continue to this day.

Was it — is it — real? Perhaps. After all, the deepest trenches in the ocean are thousands of miles long and seven crushing miles deep — sunless, pitiless voids where impossible pressures make it an unexplored and alien place. Who knows what treasures, and horrors, they really contain!

Was The Kraken Real?

Wherever there is deep or dark, the unknown and unexplored, then also come the legends. Tales of a monstrous, many armed sea creature exists from ancient times. Like the Greek legend of the Scylla, a monster with six long necks, each with its own frightening head and a body with twelve tentacle-like legs. And later, in 1555, Olaus Magnus wrote of a giant sea creature that was like a mighty tree up by the roots.

The term Kraken appeared in 1735 in the Systema Naturae, where stories about this monster dated back to twelfth century Norway. These tales often refer to a creature so big that it is mistaken for an island. Even as late as 1752, when the Bishop of Bergen, Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan, wrote his The Natural History of Norway he described the Kraken as “incontestably the largest Sea monster in the world” with a width of one and a half miles.

Disappearing islands — fanciful? Well, as recently as 2012, scientists found that an island (Sandy Island) that had been on ocean charts and even shown on Google Earth since the year 2000… wasn’t there anymore. In fact, navigation charts showed a water depth of over 4,000 feet — nothing there but deep, black ocean depths. Was it something from the fathomless void simply basking on the surface temporarily?

The myth of the Kraken has been colored by reality over the years, like in 1896, when the rotting carcass of great sized creature beached itself on the coast of St. Augustine, Florida. It was first seen by Mr. Herbert Coles and Dunham Coretter on a bicycle trip. When the young men saw the carcass, it had sunk into the sand because of its immense weight. The next day, Dr. DeWitt Webb, founder of the St. Augustine Historical Society and Institute of Science, arrived on the scene. The creature’s skin was of an extremely light pink color with a silvery tint to it. They concluded it weighed roughly five tons and the visible portions were twenty-three feet in length, four feet high, and eighteen feet across the widest part of the back. Webb decided that it was not a whale but instead some kind of cephalopod.

Myth and reality collide again and again. For example, in Japan, there is a legend of an enormous sea creature called the Akkorokamui. Its home is Volcano Bay, which is located in the southwestern island of Hokkaido. The Akkorokamui is said to be a giant squid-like creature, 300 hundred feet long, a brilliant red color, with giant staring eyes and a noxious odor. It was greatly feared by the local fishermen, as it was said to swamp boats, taking any fallen fishermen down to the depths, never to be seen again.

Just recently, for the first time, a giant squid was photographed live in the Sea of Japan. Brought to the surface, the smallish creature (around twenty feet) gave off a smell of ammonia (a substance in great quantity in their flesh that allows them to manage the huge pressure of the depths and also attain negative buoyancy required to float and hunt in mid water).

An ancient Japanese legend tells of a creature with massive trunk-like tentacles, noxious smell, giant eyes, and striking red color. And then one brought to the surface exactly like that described all those centuries ago — how could the legend have been so accurate, when this describes the giant squid, Architeuthis, so clearly? We know that these giants live down there… perhaps they aren’t miles long, and can’t be mistaken for islands that can be mapped, but did they once exist? Well, the Kraken is said to be the monstrous cousin to this giant Architeuthis squid. And though scientists have come across many strange things in the world’s seas, they have yet to find trace of the legendary Kraken… or maybe, until now…

In a presentation made at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis, Mark McMenamin, a study researcher and paleontologist at Mount Holyoke College, presented evidence for the Kraken. His theory derived from some deep scoring found on the bones and remains of nine forty-five-foot ichthyosaurs from the Triassic period (248 million to 206 million years ago). Perhaps the fingerprints of the legendary Kraken?

How these particular huge ichthyosaurs died has long been a mystery. In the 1950s Charles Lewis Camp hypothesized that the ichthyosaurs had fallen victim to a toxic plankton bloom or became stranded in shallow water. But recent work on the rocks surrounding the fossils seem to suggest that many of the creatures died in deep water… very deep water.

Obsessed with solving the puzzle of how these beasts were killed, McMenamin looked hard at the fossil evidence. By arranging the vertebrae of some ichthyosaur remains, he noticed something odd in the patterning. Something that resembled the gigantic sucker marks like those from a giant cephalopod’s tentacle. According to McMenamin, this “Kraken” would have been nearly a hundred feet long and most likely caught the ichthyosaurs and dragged their massive corpses back to its underwater lair.

Comparing this hypothesized behavior to that of the modern octopus, McMenamin said, “It is known that the modern octopus will pile the remains of its prey in a midden and play with and manipulate those pieces.” So, the Kraken may have been monstrously large prehistoric cephalopods that fed on some of the Triassic ocean’s largest predators, and stored their bodies in a larder for later consumption.

We know more every day. We already know that the giant squid can grow to enormous sizes, making it one of the largest animals on the planet, that they are intelligent, and fantastically strong. But what we don’t really know is just how big they can get, or how long they can live, or how often (and why) they come to the surface.

(Taken from my blog post in ThrillerCentral — “Fingerprints of the Kraken”.)

The Southern Seas Devil’s Triangle

Bass Strait is a channel connecting the Tasman Sea on the east with the Indian Ocean on the west, and separating Tasmania on the south from the Australian mainland on the north. The first recorded disappearances in the area go back to 1797 when the ship, Sydney Cove, was wrecked. One of the vessels engaged in the salvage operations, Eliza, mysteriously vanished on her way back to Sydney. From 1838–1840, seven vessels were lost in the area but only wreckage from three has ever been found. The remaining four remain a mystery to this day. Over the following century dozens of other ships have mysteriously vanished after entering the Southern Sea’s triangle, never to be seen again.

In 1858 a British warship, Sappho, vanished into thin air, along with over a hundred crew. The Sappho had been seen by the crew of the schooner Yarrow, off Cape Bridgewater, Victoria, at the western entrance to Bass Strait on 18 February. But she never reached her destination of Sydney. Numerous ships took part in a search, but all failed to find any trace of the missing ship.

With the introduction of aircraft in the beginning of the 20th century, the Southern Sea’s “triangle” continued to make headlines with mysterious vanishings. The first aircraft to vanish was a military Airco DH 9A. It was being used to search for a missing ship, the Amelia J, in 1920. No trace of the plane has ever been found.

Ocean Submarine Mysteries

USS Scorpion (SSN-589) was a Skipjack class nuclear submarine of the United States Navy and the sixth vessel of the U.S. Navy to carry that name. Scorpion was lost on 22 May 1968, with ninety-nine crewmen dying in the incident. The USS Scorpion is one of two nuclear submarines the U.S. Navy has lost, along with the USS Thresher. It was one of four mysterious submarine disappearances in 1968; the others being the Israeli submarine INS Dakar, the French submarine Minerve (S647), and the Soviet submarine K-129.

Massive Antarctic Algae Bloom Seen From Space

The bloom, estimated to be around 500 miles wide and 200 miles long, was captured by Australian scientists monitoring a satellite 1,850 miles above the Earth. Scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division say they are still not sure exactly what caused the bloom but they predict it may affect the local wildlife. ABC News, March 05, 2012