A radical new theory on sea serpents is to be announced in this year’s Orkney International Science Festival.
It is being put forward by one of the leading experts on the Loch Ness Monster phenomenon. He will speak, appropriately, in the Orkney island of Stronsay which was the landing place of a strange sea creature just over two centuries ago.
Adrian Shine is the leader of the Loch Ness & Morar Project and has been carrying out fieldwork in the Highlands for nearly 40 years. In 1987 he organised Operation Deepscan, a sonar sweep of Loch Ness which opened up new directions of research on the loch’s food chain and huge internal waves.
More recently he organised work on sediment coring, which has built up a picture of the development of the loch from the end of the Ice Age.
He has published over a dozen scientific papers on his researches on the loch and led over a thousand students and volunteers on expeditions. His work has led to a new focus on specific aspects of the loch, the physics of its structure and the unusual surface wave patterns that can appear sometimes.
As a result of his work, he has gradually developed some possible hypotheses as to what the cause of the Loch Ness phenomenon may be, but he says that it is important to understand that the stories of monsters in lochs or at sea may not all have the same origin.
"I’m a naturalist," he said, "and so my approach is to try to classify, and the various sighting of unusual water creatures come into a number of different categories. The first step is to build up a picture of the various categories, and the second step is to focus on a particular group and see if we can find any pattern of explanation.
"One particular group of ‘sea serpent’ sightings, once known as the Norwegian Sea-serpent, describe a long humped body with a head and neck moving through the water. I have a hypothesis which might explain them."
That’s different from some of the Orkney stories which speak of a very high column of a neck rising up out of the sea.
Adrian Shine said that an insight had come from a visit to the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall and he had subsequently worked on the idea.
"This is not the Stronsay beast or indeed its possible relative washed up in Cherbourg in 1934. They have a different explanation; but my new approach might possibly explain some of the giant serpents seen at sea."
He will give his talk in the King Street Halls in Kirkwall on Monday, September 5, at 2pm.
