Intensely blue, the waters around Bermuda are warmed by the Gulf Stream—one of the world's largest and swiftest oceanic currents. Humpback whales pass through these waters each year, migrating from polar feeding grounds.

 

These waters are also known to legions of luminous deep-sea creatures and intrepid undersea explorers. In the 1930s, zoologist William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton descended a thousand meters into the depths around Bermuda for a first view of life in a place the sunlight never reaches. Beebe compared what he saw to naked space itself, out far beyond atmosphere, between the stars, where the blackness of space, the shining planets, comets, suns, and stars must really be closely akin to the world of life as it appears to the eyes of an awed human being in the open ocean one half mile down.

 

For Beebe and Barton, the comets, suns and stars were living creatures reflecting rainbows of iridescence, were flashing, sparkling, and glowing with their own living light. Fireflies and glowworms are famous light-makers on the land.  But in the deep sea, about 90% of the creatures—jellies, fish, bacteria, shrimp, squids and many others—have some form of bioluminescence to signal one another. Scientists say these bursts of starry light may be the most common form of communication on the planet.

 

In the open sea, jellies are also among the most abundant forms of life. The Gulf Stream current can carry these oddly beautiful drifters along at about 160 kilometers a day.

 

Buffered by the Gulf Stream is a magically quiet, gently rotating mass of sargassum weed that expands over more than 5 million square kilometers of open waters. Isolated by walls of fast-moving currents between Bermuda and Puerto Rico, the Sargasso Sea holds a liquid jungle of creatures, which have evolved over the ages to exist in floating forests of golden brown sargassum. Within its leafy, sunlit masses are camouflaged such creatures as loggerhead turtles, file fish, sea hares and the speckled brown Sargasso crab.

 

For scientists, it's a living laboratory strategically located in the open sea. For creatures living in the undersea caves, among the reefs, and in the great depth below, Bermuda is simply home.