The Bermuda Triangle is a patch of the Atlantic Ocean, out at sea between Florida, Puerto Rico and the island of Bermuda. For many years people have told stories and written books about it. The figures here are a way to test those stories against the numbers. The area people call the Bermuda Triangle covers approximately 500,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) of ocean. One corner of it is the island of Bermuda, a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic. Its nearest land is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, approximately 640 miles (1,030 km) away.

The sea around any such place is large and deep. Earth's seas cover approximately 70 percent of the planet and average approximately 12,100 feet (3,700 meters) deep, so a lost boat or plane can leave little to find. The Gulf Stream is a stream of warm water that moves through the Atlantic Ocean, and it flows at approximately 4 miles per hour on average, and up to approximately 5.6 mph near the surface. It carries more water than all of the world's rivers combined. The swiftly flowing Gulf Stream would quickly spread out any wreckage from an accident, making evidence hard to find.

Next, count the traffic. Numerous ships and planes travel through the Bermuda Triangle, so it is a busy part of the ocean. The Triangle area is one of the most heavily traveled regions in the world; with more ships and planes, the odds that something goes wrong for some of them are greater. As of September 2026, PortMiami, on the Florida edge of the region, welcomed its 10 millionth cruise passenger of fiscal year 2026 on September 14, a new record.

Weather adds its own numbers. Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30. A storm is called a hurricane when its winds reach 74 miles per hour. According to NOAA, most Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes pass through the Bermuda Triangle area. NOAA is the U.S. ocean science agency. It additionally states the Gulf Stream can cause rapid, sometimes violent changes in weather, and the Gulf Stream is sometimes between 15 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the water next to it.

To tell whether a place is unusual, you compare it with others. A 2013 WWF study of the most accident-prone waters for shipping did not list the Bermuda Triangle. It named the South China Sea and East Indies, the east Mediterranean and Black Sea, and the North Sea and British Isles as the hotspots for shipping accidents. Since 1999 there have been 293 shipping accidents in the South China Sea and East Indies, according to WWF's 2013 study.

A second 2013 report gives the worldwide figures. The insurer Allianz reported that the number of ships lost worldwide averages approximately 146 a year, and that 106 ships were lost in 2012. It additionally discovered that shipping accidents were down 27 percent over ten years, and that human error remains the core challenge. Both figures are dated 2013.

Insurers and the Coast Guard have looked at their own records. Lloyd's of London is the ship insurance company. According to EBSCO's research summary, Lloyd's of London and the U.S. Coast Guard both say this part of the Atlantic is not unusually dangerous, and that the number of accidents is in proportion to how busy the shipping route is. NOAA states there is no evidence that unexplained trouble happens more frequently in the Bermuda Triangle than in other busy parts of the ocean.

Some of the numbers are about waves. Rogue waves are unusually large waves that appear among smaller ones: more than twice the height of the surrounding waves, frequently from an unexpected direction. Scientists once thought a rogue wave would hit any given spot in the ocean only about once every 10,000 years, but data from buoys and platforms suggest such big waves are considerably more frequent. According to the National Weather Service's JetStream school, rogue waves can form when ocean swells travel at different speeds and directions and their crests combine, producing a tall wave that then disappears.

Numbers about warning have changed, too. NASA launched TIROS-1, the world's first successful weather satellite, on April 1, 1960. TIROS-1 orbited 450 miles above Earth, worked for only 78 days and sent back more than 19,000 usable pictures; its first image showed clouds over the northeastern United States. Before weather forecasts got better, ships in the area had less warning about storms than ships have today. In the 1940s, navigators relied on dead reckoning (working out position from direction and speed), celestial navigation, and then direction finders and radio range stations; over oceans, dead-reckoning errors were large.

One more number reaches back a long way. Gas hydrate is an ice-like solid made of water and gas, such as methane, that can form in the sediments under the sea floor. Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey record no significant methane releases in the Bermuda Triangle area in the past 15,000 years. One way to judge a place is to count the trouble, count the traffic and compare both with other places.

Words to know

• hotspots: problem places
• insurer: risk-covering company
• wreckage: broken remains
• hurricane: big ocean storm
• proportion: matching share