The Navigatio Santi Brendani Abatis, a ninth century manuscript, describes the many adventures of St. Brendan the Navigator, who supposedly undertook a seven-year voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, eventually reaching what might possibly have been Newfoundland. In 1976–77, Tim Severin, a British scholar, crossed the Atlantic on a boat constructed based on the details described by Brendan, demonstrating the feasibility of such a voyage. (source)

Scientists speculate that the iceberg that sunk the Titanic may have come from the Jacobshavn glacier located in west Greenland. This glacier is one of the largest on earth, measuring about 15 kilometres across. The Jacobshavn glacier is also the fastest-moving glacier on Earth, moving over 7 kilometres per year. Much ice from the glacier enters the ocean and breaks up into small chunks measuring from 10 metres to 1 kilometre across. (source)

Oysters in their natural habitat open their shells at high tide and close them at low tide. Oysters moved from Long Island Sound to tanks in Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A. (near Lake Michigan) at first opened up at the time of high tide on Long Island Sound. By a few weeks later, though, the rhythm of opening and closing had shifted until the oysters were in tune with a non-existent tide, but one that would exist if Illinois were covered by the ocean.

Stone carvings dated between 500 and 1000 A.D. have been found in West Virginia that appear to have been written in Old Irish using the Ogham alphabet. Perhaps they were carved by Irish missionaries in the wake of St. Brendan the Navigator's possible voyage to the new world. (source)

The island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean is the home of the tambalacoque tree, which, until the 17^th century, flourished in the hot and humid climate. Then, all of a sudden, the tree seemed to lose the ability to grow from seed. No reason was found, with the result that, by the 1970's, there were only 13 very old tambalacoque trees left. It was then that an American ecologist, Stanley Temple, noticed that the tambalacoque had stopped growing from seed at precisely the time when the dodo became extinct. Many seeds will germinate only after having been eaten by a particular animal and passing through its digestive system. As an experiment, Temple fed tambalacoque seeds to turkeys and gathered seeds up from their droppings. Some of these seeds did germinate, and there is hope that the tambalacoque tree will survive.

Riftia pachyptila.
Image credit: NOAA/Monika Bright.

Biologists divide the animal kingdom into as many as thirty-one different divisions, called phyla (singular phylum). One animal is so unique that it has its own phylum. In hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor lives a reddish worm, Riftia pachyptila, that creates a long, tough tube to live in. It ranges up to 25 feet long and ingests food, but has neither a mouth nor intestines. It is apparently nourished by bacteria that live inside its cells.

Charles Francis Coghlan (1841–1899), a native of Prince Edward Island, was an internationally known actor. He was appearing in Galveston, Texas, when, he died on November 27, 1899 following a brief illness. He was buried in a granite vault in a cemetery in Galveston, Texas, in a lead-lined coffin. On September 8, 1900, a deadly hurricane struck Galveston (over 6,000 people were killed), and Coghlan's coffin was washed out to sea. In October 1908, off the coast of Prince Edward Island, some fishermen found Coghlan's barnacle-encrusted coffin, only a few miles from his birthplace. It is believed that the coffin had floated into the Gulf of Mexico, where it would have been caught by the West Indian current and carried into the Gulf Stream, moving north in the Atlantic Ocean until it reached the vicinity of Newfoundland, where it would have been thrown off course by a gale, and and then drifted aimlessly until it reached Prince Edward Island. (source)