Trillions of Bacteria Are Screaming with Light

On a calm and cloudless night far out to sea, gazing toward the heavens, you’d expect to see the sky glowing with stars, offsetting the impenetrable black of the deep ocean.

But one night 167 years ago, in waters off the coast of Java, Indonesia, things were far from normal. According to an account by Captain W.E. Kingman—best known for describing the Kingman Reef, a remote slip of land in the Pacific Ocean—it was as if sky and sea had traded places. “There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the sky … appeared as black as if a storm was raging,” noted the captain in his logbook. “The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plain covered with snow.” To his apparent horror, the seas looked as if they were glowing:

The scene was one of awful grandeur, the sea having turned to phosphorus, and the heavens being hung in blackness, and the stars going out, seemed to indicate that all nature was preparing for that last grand conflagration which we are taught to believe is to annihilate this material world.

While Kingman and his crew did indeed survive this “grand conflagration,” tales of seas that glow have popped up alongside mermaids and dragons in nautical lore throughout the ages. While these creatures of fiction