The Myth of the Bermuda Triangle 2

Many people have heard of the Bermuda triangle where planes or ships disappear without trace. Most famously in 1945, an entire flight of five US Navy TBM Avenger Torpedo bombers disappeared, together with the plane sent to search for them.

There are many explanations – alien abduction, their being sucked into a space time vortex, sea monster attack – but the most probably are natural. A good candidate is methane gas. At the bottom of the sea methane is stable as methane hydrates. If anything is done to disturb it – like an earth tremor – some of the methane may turn to gas and start to rise. When it reaches the surface, if it encounters a plane, there are three not very healthy things that can happen.

1 The planes engines may stop, starved of oxygen.

2 The planes engines may explode, because methane is a very explosive gas. If any enters the planes engines which are hot and constantly burning fuel, the methane may explode and destroy the engines and possibly the entire aircraft or at least render them unworkable.

Methane is less dense than air, and a plane flying through air mixed with methane will generate less lift. The weight of the plane will stay the same but is now greater than the lift so the plane will start to fall. If it falls too far it will hit the sea.

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