The glowing area spanned 15,400 square kilometres, an area the size of Connecticut (Image: Steven D Miller, US Naval Research Laboratory)
The ancient mariners were right. Tales of “milky seas” that glow bluish-white at night and extend as far as the horizon have been spun by sailors for centuries. Now this eerie glow has been spotted from space.
Steve Miller of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California, found this strange phenomenon in a trawl through archives of satellite cloud-cover data. Though the effect has been reported more than 200 times since 1915, he could find only one…
