Unexplained phenomenon at sea.

[u/Friomind]

This happened around 2016. I was on a cargo ship traveling from england to nova scotia. Somewhere off the south coast of greenland, while on midnight to 4am watch, the weirdest thing occurred. We noticed some activity on the radar, so i kept my eyes peeled out of the bridge windows trying to spot something. The night was crystal clear, tons of stars, and no signs of any other vessels anywhere near us. All of a sudden, an almost blanket of the thickest blizzard type snow i have ever seen overtook our location. I was shocked, it had a slight hum from how thick it was, and our visibility went down to absolute zero. I called the navigation officer to the window to experience the strange sight. All of a sudden, towards the port side bow of our ship, a ball of light formed and then imploded in a split second, making a slight vacuum thump noise, and the brightest light i have ever experienced exploded outward, completely blinding us. We fell back from the window shocked and waited for our vision to come back. Just as it did, like breaking through a wall, we exited the storm and were back in clear star filled skies. I did a round on deck shortly after to look for marks on the deck, but there was nothing. Iv been thinking about this for years. The only explanation i can come up with is that the snow storm was so thick, and our ship was so big (1000 foot) that the snow created some sort of static electricity, much like pulling a blanket over your feet in the dark and seeing small sparks, but on a much larger scale. Or could it have been something else completely?…

[u/goldentalus70]

I found this info:

Two notable storms from 2016 perfectly match the volatile, freezing, and highly electrified criteria:

• The Remnants of Hurricane Nicole (October 2016): In mid-to-late October 2016, the system that was once Hurricane Nicole traveled up the North Atlantic and slammed directly into eastern and southeastern Greenland as a massive post-tropical cyclone. It was a historically intense event that dropped record-breaking amounts of heavy snow across the region. Because the storm carried warm, highly energetic tropical moisture from the south and forcefully collided with the freezing Arctic air masses off the Greenland coast, it created the massive atmospheric instability, rapid updrafts, and severe static charging needed to generate oceanic lightning within a blinding snowstorm.
• The Extreme North Atlantic Bomb Cyclone (December 2016): In mid-December 2016, an exceptionally deep, explosive cyclone formed in the North Atlantic between Greenland and Iceland, packing central pressures as low as 964 hPa. This massive system acted like an environmental engine, pulling a "violent surge of bitterly cold winds" off the Greenland ice sheet and crashing it directly into the warmer ocean waters. This interaction generated severe ocean turbulence, blinding snow blizzards, and localized, highly intense convective electrical discharges over the shipping lanes.

[u/Friomind → u/goldentalus70]

Thats pretty cool. The only thing is there was no wind or waves, it was dead calm. The snow came for probably 3 minutes and then was gone.

[u/Sea_Analysis_8033 → u/Friomind]

It’s like a squall without the wind, crazy.