Perpetual Ocean

This remarkable video of our living ocean planet shows how ocean currents flowed around the world during the period from June 2005 through December 2007.

The video was produced by the Scientific Visualization Studio at the Goddard Space Flight Center using data from satellites and sensors in the ocean, and putting it together with a mathematical model developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The result is an emotive view-from-space of these dynamic, swirling patterns of currents weaving around each other and spiraling around the edges of continents. Watch the Gulf Stream as it flows out of the Gulf of Mexico, keeping much of Europe from freezing over. And see other major current, like the Humboldt and the Kuroshio, as they give birth to dozens of smaller currents, all of them in perpetual motion.

Posted May 3, 2012, by Michael Mountain