pplpod

Sailors in the northwestern Indian Ocean have long reported nights when the sea turned into a glowing, snow white plain to the horizon. Unlike the flashing dinoflagellates of breaking waves or Scotland's localized glow...

In the first century AD Pliny the Elder recorded that Romans thought the huge triangular stones they found were serpent tongues that fell from the sky during lunar eclipses, and Renaissance nobles dipped these tongue...

On March 26, 2024 the 980 foot, Singapore flagged container ship Dali left the Port of Baltimore at 12:44 a.m. with two harbor pilots aboard. At 1:24 a.m., moving at nearly nine knots in the Fort McHenry channel, it...

Box jellyfish, the Cubozoa, were moved out of the true jellyfish in 1973 because they are active hunters rather than drifters. A shelf of tissue called the velarium narrows the bell opening like a thumb over a hose...

The bound captive stepping off a board over the sea is the classic pirate image, yet it virtually never happened during the Golden Age of Piracy, from the late 1600s to about 1730. The earliest documented account comes...

A catamaran is simply two parallel hulls of equal size, and that wide stance gives it form stability without the heavy lead keel a monohull needs, so it sits light and shallow in the water. The design was pioneered by...

Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian adventurer, zoologist, and ethnographer who lived from 1914 to 2002, nearly drowned twice as a boy in Larvik and grew up terrified of the water. His mother passed on her fascination with...

A 1960 US Air Force airframe maintenance manual sends mechanics to Waterline 50 to repair a supersonic jet. The episode explains why. A ship's hull is all compound curves, so naval architects draw waterlines, horizontal...

Stockton Rush co founded OceanGate in 2009 with shallow wreck dives off California and in the Gulf of Mexico, but he knew the Titanic was the name that would sell seats at up to $250,000 each. He called safety...

Commercial fishing is still the second most dangerous job in the US, and sailor superstitions grew as ways to feel in control of a sea that could kill at any moment. Older scholars dismissed them as childish folklore...

The viral sea shanty craze got the history wrong: most of the songs, including The Wellerman, are not shanties, and 18th century pirates never sang them. A shanty was strictly a work song, sung without instruments in...

Launched in 1797, the 44 gun frigate USS Constitution is the oldest commissioned naval vessel still afloat, though wooden warships of her day lasted perhaps 10 to 15 years. The Naval Act of 1794 funded six frigates to...

Artemis II astronauts carry an emergency backup built on a design about 300 years old: the sextant. Isaac Newton sketched the theory in unpublished writings, and around 1731 John Hadley in England and Thomas Godfrey in...

On July 12, 1999, the United States sent its last commercial Morse message, repeating the 1844 words What hath God wrought, and in January 1997 the French Navy signed off with a call before its eternal silence. Yet the...

Dutch sailors believed tiny protective spirits lived in the carved figure at the bow, and that a ship lost without one doomed its crew's souls to haunt the sea. The urge to give a ship a face runs back millennia: Greek...