“The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plane covered with snow. There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky appeared as black as if a storm was raging.” These are the words written by a sailor in 1854, after encountering the rare phenomenon seafarers called ‘milky seas’.
These glowing ocean events have baffled humans for centuries. The “awful grandeur” the nineteenth-century sailor described - which made him think the end was nigh - we now know to be a form of bioluminescence: light emitted by living organisms during chemical reactions in their bodies.
