One of the comforts when you go see movies like The Odyssey and witness the large, awe-inspiring mythical beasts is that they won’t follow you into the real world. But for some, like Charybdis, the whirlpool capable of swallowing ships whole, that isn’t entirely accurate.

Even as far back as 400 BCE, historians were identifying the inspiration for Charybdis as the Strait of Messina, a narrow strait in Italy between the mainland and Sicily.

And its waters are, in fact, infamously treacherous.

Why we narrowed in on this spot

Homer describes the location of Charybdis and Scylla as a narrow waterway “an arrow-shot across” with steep cliffs on one side, where the six-headed Scylla resides, and a lower area with a fig tree on the other, near which Charybdis dwells beneath the water’s surface.

This matches up with the geography of the Strait of Messina, with a large rocky outcropping in the Italian town of Scilla (sound familiar?) on the mainland. On the Sicilian side of the strait, the ground is lower, and sailors warn of a permanent eddy caused by the mixing of the waters of the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas.

Beyond modern conjecture, though, we have ancient validation.

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In his work The History of the Peloponnesian War from roughly 425 to 400 BCE, Thucydides wrote, “This is the stretch of sea between Rhegium and Messina at the point where Sicily is nearest to the continent. It is the Charybdis of the legends through which Odysseus is supposed to have sailed.”

This was only 250 or so years after Homer composed The Odyssey in about 725–675 BCE.

The geographer Strabo made the same assertion in the sixth book of his work Geography in 7 BC to 23, describing the whirlpool as, “a monstrous deep, into which the ships are easily drawn by the refluent currents of the strait and plunged prow-foremost along with a mighty eddying of the whirlpool; and when the ships are gulped down and broken to pieces, the wreckage is swept along to the Tauromenian shore.”

The science behind the myth

Strabo was right, by the way, that the turbulent waters of the Strait of Messina are due to changing currents.

To the north of the strait lies the Tyrrhenian Sea, and to the south is the Ionian Sea. These two bodies of water are very different in terms of temperature, salinity and density, making it so that the waters don’t mix easily when they meet in the Strait of Messina.

More importantly, however, is the fact that the seas have opposing tides. 

When the Tyrrhenian Sea is at high tide, the Ionian Sea is at low tide. When the Tyrrhenian Sea is at low tide, the Ionian Sea is at high tide. 

Below the surface, as well, rests an underwater mountain capable of disrupting the flow of water on its own. 

This creates alternating currents through the Strait of Messina, which fuel the rough conditions and whirlpools of ancient myth, though they aren’t quite as intense as Homer and Strabo described.

The whirlpools appear as glassy, almost calm areas in otherwise choppy waters, driven by the upwelling of colder water from deep below the surface.

A message to sailors

Today, the Strait of Messina can be safely navigated if you use the currents to your advantage and keep an eye on the weather forecast for anything that could cause rough conditions.

The currents are strong even on a calm day, reaching over 5 miles per hour (which may not sound like a lot but is on the water for small vessels) and tearing up seaweed from below.

And one of the causes for the unique geography - and hazards - of the Strait of Messina is the fault lines that lie beneath. 

In 1783, a sequence of violent earthquakes struck the region, causing landslides along the coast and tsunamis to tear through the waterway.

While we can’t say for sure that Homer was in fact inspired by the Strait of Messina in his description of the path between Charybdis and Scylla, the facts line up well enough and enough of history’s experts agree to tie the two together.

Sara Tonks is a content meteorologist with weather.com and has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Georgia Tech in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, along with a master’s degree from Unity Environmental University in Marine Science.