Fallout 4’s Glowing Sea Remains A Mystery
Fallout 4’s Glowing Sea is one of the more mysterious locations in the Fallout series. It’s a heavily irradiated wasteland full of powerful monsters and only a small smattering of survivors. The Glowing Sea is a late-game area that's difficult to explore because of its extreme radiation, which could point to why the region is the way that it is, but that can’t be the whole story.
While irradiated wastelands are kind of Fallout’s whole thing, not many places are as treacherous as the Glowing Sea. The reason given for the Glowing Sea’s current state of constant glowing haze is that it was the site of a nuclear device detonating, but that can’t be the entire story. After all, all Fallout games take place near the sites of nuclear detonations, but most of them don’t have anything like the Glowing Sea or the Radstorms it can create when clouds pass through.
Glowing Ghouls Like Jason Bright Could Help Solve The Mystery
Aside from a Glowing Sea, Fallout also has glowing ghouls. These Glowing Ones appeared as early as the first game, and are ghouls who are extra irradiated, and glow green - although originally they glowed white. One of the most memorable glowing ones in the series is Jason Bright from Fallout: New Vegas who tasks the player with helping him repair several rocket ships for his cult’s “Great Journey.” While ghouls like Bright are said to glow just because they have absorbed a higher amount of rads, there is reason to believe this might not be the case.
After all, if glowing ones were created simply by absorbing a certain amount of Radiation, one would think that all ghouls would eventually become them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There are very old ghouls like Eddie Winter who have still managed not to become Glowing Ones. It may be that glowing ones need to be formed under specific conditions. In Fallout: The Roleplaying Game, there also seems to be a connection between glowing ones and the Glowing Sea. In the Winter of Atom sourcebook, players encounter a massive glowing one named Dawn who has grown huge in the Glowing Sea. This could indicate that there is some special ingredient mixed into the storms there that would create a glowing one and cause it to grow even larger than normal.
Fallout’s The Glow May Hold Some Answers About The Glowing Sea
Another possible hint at the cause of the Glowing Sea could be seen in a similar region from Fallout: The Glow. Here, players will encounter a massive glowing crater where an old West Tek Research Facility used to stand. The facility was working on what West Tek hoped would be a virus that could help cure all human ailments, but when it was bombed during the war, it was combined with the Radiation and turned into the Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV), which eventually produced Super Mutants.
While plenty of areas in New California were also hit by bombs, The Glow is the only one that, well, glows. Since the main difference is that the radiation from the bombs mixed with the FEV here, the glow seemingly comes from the combination. It’s possible that the Glowing Sea is the result of something similar. The name of the region even seems to be a reference to The Glow, which could be a hint at its origins.
The Glowing Sea May Be The Result Of More Than Just Radiation
Like The Glow before it, the Glowing Sea has unique properties that stand out from its surrounding area. It is very possible that a similar situation took place, where the bombs that hit the area had a unique reaction to some other chemical or substance that was already present. Perhaps there is something similar to FEV that is responsible for turning some ghouls into Glowing Ones, and that is what the bombs reacted with to create the Glowing Sea.
It’s very possible players will never get a concrete answer as to what has caused Fallout 4’s Glowing Sea. After all, the developers may want to leave the explanation intentionally vague, seeing as there isn't likely any real science that could explain it. However, it would be fun to get some more lore from Bethesda about what caused the Glowing Sea to form. Even if the answer isn’t in any Fallout 4 materials, it is possible that Mophidius’ Fallout: The Roleplaying Game could eventually provide some answers, seeing as it has explored this region before.
