Researchers say methane rising to the surface of the ocean could explain the sudden loss of ships in the western North Atlantic. And anywhere else, for that matter 
 
 Name: The Bermuda Triangle 
 
 Age: 52 years. 
 
 Appearance: Then all of a sudden … disappearance! 
 
 Location: Between Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda (approx). 
 
 What is it? Well, according to Vincent Gaddis, who first coined the phrase in a pulp magazine article in 1964, the Bermuda Triangle is an area of the western North Atlantic where ships and planes are strangely likely to vanish without trace. It’s also a terrible song by Barry Manilow. 
 
 I see. Leaving Manilow aside for now, why would things southwest of Bermuda suddenly vanish? Some suggest the involvement of aliens, the devil and the lost city of Atlantis. Some say that the magnetic properties of the rocks might scramble compass readings, others that giant bubbles of methane might sink ships when they reach the surface. 
 
 Hilarious! Actually, that last one might be true. Researchers at the Arctic University of Norway have just discovered huge underwater craters off the coast of Norway, which they consider “probably a cause of enormous blowouts of gas”. The craters that is, not Norway. 
 
 Goodness. And ships certainly could sink suddenly if the water beneath them turned to foam, which these craters – measuring up to 45m deep and 800m wide – could be capable of doing. 
 
 So that solves the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle? Nope. 
 
 Why not? First, it isn’t clear whether gas blowouts happen in the triangle area. Second, even if they did, it isn’t clear how they would make planes vanish from the sky above. Third, several of the incidents attributed to “the Bermuda Triangle” involve people vanishing from ships, rather than whole ships vanishing. Fourth, there isn’t anything mysterious about the Bermuda Triangle to start with. 
 
 What? Gaddis’s original article, and others that followed it, were total cobblers. Some supposedly vanished boats were later found. Other vanishings, such as the disappearance in 1945 of the five Flight 19 training planes, just aren’t difficult to explain. (They got lost and ran out of fuel.) Indeed boats and planes only vanish in the Bermuda Triangle about as often as they vanish everywhere else. 
 
 So you could say that the Bermuda Triangle itself is … a phantom mystery? Erm, yes, if you feel like it. 
 
 Do say: Did aliens make people believe that ships were going missing in the west Atlantic? 
 
 Don’t say: Attack of the killer sea farts! ||||| Methane bubbles from the sea floor could, in theory, sink ships and may explain the odd disappearances of some vessels, Australian researchers reported Tuesday. 
 
 The huge bubbles can erupt from undersea deposits of solid methane, known as gas hydrates. An odorless gas found in swamps and mines, methane becomes solid under the enormous pressures found on deep sea floors. 
 
 The icelike methane deposits can break off and become gaseous as they rise, creating bubbles at the surface. 
 
 David May and Joseph Monaghan of Monash University in Australia said they had demonstrated how a giant bubble from one of these deposits could swamp a ship. 
 
 “Sonar surveys of the ocean floor in the North Sea (between Britain and continental Europe) have revealed large quantities of methane hydrates and eruption sites,” May and Monaghan wrote in their report, published in the American Journal of Physics. 
 
 “A recent survey revealed the presence of a sunken vessel within the center of one particularly large eruption site, now known as the Witches Hole.” 
 
 “One proposed sinking mechanism attributes the vessel’s loss of buoyancy to bubbles of methane gas released from an erupting underwater hydrate,” they wrote. “The known abundance of gas hydrates in the North Sea, coupled with the vessel’s final resting position and its location in the Witches Hole, all support a gas bubble theory.” 
 
 No one has ever seen such an eruption, and no one knows how large the bubbles coming off a methane deposit would be. 
 
 May and Monaghan created a model of a single large bubble coming up under a ship. They trapped water between vertical glass plates, launched gas bubbles from the bottom and used a video camera to record what happened to an acrylic “hull” floating on the surface. 
 
 “Whether or not the ship will sink depends on its position relative to the bubble. If it is far enough from the bubble, it is safe,” they wrote. 
 
 “If it is exactly above the bubble, it also is safe, because at a stagnation point of the flow the boat is not carried into the trough. The danger position is between the bubble’s stagnation point and the edge of the mound where the trough formed,” they concluded. 
 
 © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. ||||| Go to the Legal Help page to request content changes for legal reasons. ||||| Explosions of trapped methane gas are thought to account for the mysterious craters found in Siberia, including this one. 
 
 The discovery of several mysterious craters in Siberia earlier this year launched a wave of speculation about their origins. Now, a new report suggests an explanation for the holes, claiming it could also be linked to the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. 
 
 However, other scientists not involved in the new report say the weird sinkhole mechanism likely doesn't explain vanishings in the Bermuda Triangle — a place that has never been proven to exist. 
 
 In July, Siberian reindeer herders discovered a huge crater on the Yamal Peninsula, which means "end of the world." Later, two more gaping holes were found, one in the Taz District and one on the Taymyr Peninsula. But while scientists speculated as to the cause of these weird Siberian holes, their origin remained a mystery. 
 
 In July, Russian scientists reported in the journal Nature that the explosive release of gases trapped in the permafrost — known as methane hydrates — likely carved out the enormous sinkholes. Air near the crater's bottom contained unusually high concentrations of methane, they said. 
 
 Mysterious happenings 
 
 But now, researchers have gone even further, suggesting that methane hydrates could be responsible for the disappearances of ships and aircraft under supposedly mysterious circumstances in the Bermuda Triangle, according to The Siberian Times, which cited a report in Science in Siberia, a weekly publication of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Bermuda Triangle is a region some people say exists in the North Atlantic Ocean between Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico; many others dispute its existence. [Gallery: Lost in the Bermuda Triangle (Photos)] 
 
 But regardless of whether the Bermuda Triangle exists, the idea that methane release could sink ships holds some water, scientists say. 
 
 "It is very probable that the similar sinkholes in the ocean were produced [as a result] of decomposing gas hydrates,"said Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist who studies permafrost at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but who was not involved in the study. 
 
 Methane is normally solid under the crushing pressures of the deep sea, but chunks of the icelike substance can break off and form gas bubbles that rise to the surface. 
 
 "Gas hydrate is known to exist along the U.S. North Atlantic continental margin, with a very large province on Blake Ridge (north of the Bermuda Triangle)," Benjamin Phrampus, an Earth scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told Live Science in an email. 
 
 Loose bubbles sink ships 
 
 In fact, a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Physics found that such bubbles could indeed sink ships, at least in principle. For that study, researchers built a model ship hull and released a large bubble underneath it, filming what happened. If the ship was in the right position above the bubble, the vessel would lose buoyancy and sink, the researchers said. 
 
 But even though the phenomenon worked with a model ship, there's no evidence that it ever actually occurred, Phrampus said. In addition, such large-scale methane releases have not been reported in recent history, when the ship and airplane disappearances supposedly took place within the Bermuda Triangle. The last time the ocean floor was venting gas in that area was after the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, Phrampus said. 
 
 "I personally see it as an interesting theory and nothing more," he said. 
 
 The U.S. Navy does not believe the Bermuda Triangle exists, and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names does not recognize it as an official name. The insurance market Lloyd's of London determined that no more ships have sunk in that region than in other parts of the ocean, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. 
 
 Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. ||||| Sea bed gas blasts could explain Bermuda Triangle 
 
 Huge craters on the sea floor, found off Norway, suggest giant blowouts of methane (Alamy) 
 
 SCIENTISTS have found giant craters on the sea bed around the coast of Norway, marking spots where huge bubbles of methane have apparently exploded. 
 
 The craters are up to half a mile wide and 150ft deep and appear to have been caused by gas leaking from deposits of oil and gas buried deeper in the sea floor. The gases are thought to accumulate in sea-floor sediments before bursting through the sea bed into the water above. 
 
 Details of the discovery will be released next month at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union, with a key question being whether such bubbles could threaten ships. One idea is that they may explain the disappearance of ships in areas such as the Bermuda Triangle. 
 
 “Multiple giant craters exist on the sea floor in an area in the west-central Barents Sea . . . and are probably a cause of enormous blowouts of gas,” said ||||| The location of the so-called Bermuda Triangle. (Photo: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/CC BY 2.0) 
 
 The Bermuda Triangle, so named in a 1964 story in America’s first pulp magazine, the infamous Argosy, has long been controversial. Its existence as a center for sunken ships and downed airplanes has never gained official traction: the U.S. Navy doesn’t recognize it, nor does the U.S. Board on Geographic Names even list it as a place. 
 
 But that, of course, hasn’t stopped amateurs and some real researchers from studying and speculating about the area. This week, Bermuda Triangle fans might be seeing a breakthrough: Norwegian scientists announced they had found new evidence to support an old theory—that oceanic flatulence was behind some of the shipwrecks. 
 
 Newly-found craters off the coast of Norway suggest the sea’s potential for enormous blowouts of methane gas, the scientists said, adding some credence to an idea that has been floated before. The theory is that gas bubbles rising to the surface could sink an unfavorably-positioned ship, some scientists have speculated, though a proven case of that happening has never been recorded. 
 
 Skeptics have long held that there is a simple explanation for the phenomenon: the area is one of the most highly-trafficked shipping routes in the world, in addition to being the site of numerous tropical storms and the Gulf Stream, which can cause sudden changes in the weather. The latest evidence isn’t likely to stop true believers in the supernatural, though, or even Steven Spielberg, who explained in Close Encounters of the Third Kind that aliens were in fact behind the disappearance of Flight 19.
– A new discovery has revived an old theory about ocean water gobbling up ships in the Bermuda Triangle—if, that is, the Bermuda Triangle even exists. Researchers from the Arctic University of Norway say they've spotted large craters apparently created by methane buildups off Norway's coast, Atlas Obscura reports. "Multiple giant craters exist on the sea floor in an area in the west-central Barents Sea ... and are probably a cause of enormous blowouts of gas," they tell the Sunday Times. "The crater area is likely to represent one of the largest hotspots for shallow marine methane release in the Arctic." Other experts have said gas blowouts from such craters, which measure 150 feet deep and up to a half-mile wide in Norway, could explain the sinking of ships in a region between Puerto Rico, Miami, and Bermuda dubbed the Bermuda Triangle. "There is a version that the Bermuda Triangle is a consequence of gas hydrates reactions," Russian scientist Igor Yeltsov said last year, per the New Zealand Herald. Ice-like underwater methane can break away and form gas that bubbles to the surface, Live Science explained in 2014; Yeltsov says it erupts "like a nuclear reaction, producing huge amounts of gas." Research has shown that such eruptions could sink sea vessels, as NBC News reported in 2003, and this YouTube video appears to confirm that. But it's not clear these blowouts even occur in the Bermuda Triangle, the Guardian notes. And skeptics say the Gulf Stream's many tropical storms would better account for the Triangle's lost ships and planes. The very term "Bermuda Triangle" is questionable: Still dismissed by the US Navy, it was invented in a dramatic 1964 article that probed the "mysterious menace" behind ships and airplanes lost in the area. (A teacher may have found "the key" to finding Amelia Earhart's plane.)