In early December 2020, the world’s largest iceberg — roughly 135 km long by 44 km wide — was heading straight for South Georgia Island. Luckily for the island, iceberg Keep reading
Tag: oceanography
Seismic Events Reveal Ocean Temperatures
Decades ago, researchers proposed sending sound waves through the ocean to measure its temperature. Although the technique worked, it ran into noise pollution issues, but now it’s back, using naturally-occurring Keep reading
Underwater Optical Illusions
On a hot day, it’s not unusual to catch a glimpse of a shimmering optical illusion over a hot road, but you probably wouldn’t expect to see the same thing 2,000 meters Keep reading
Breaking
As waves fold over and break, they trap air, creating bubbles of many sizes. The smallest of these bubbles can be only a few microns across and persist for long Keep reading
Rogue Waves
After centuries of tales from sailors, in 1995 the Draupner off-shore platform recorded the first ever evidence of a freak wave – a single, wall-like wave steeper and taller than Keep reading
Swirling Blooms
Every summer, as the ice melts, the waters of the Chukchi Sea off the Alaskan coast come alive with phytoplankton blooms. In satellite images like this one, they can look Keep reading
Can Zooplankton Mix Oceans?
Krill and other tiny marine zooplankton make daily migrations to and from the ocean surface. Previously, models of ocean mixing ignored these migrations; these animals are tiny, researchers argued, so Keep reading
Modons
The spin of the Earth creates myriad eddies in our oceans, most of which move slowly westward at a speed dependent on their latitude. You can see many in the Keep reading
Ocean Mixing
Movement in Earth’s oceans is driven by a complicated interplay of many factors like temperature, salinity, and Earth’s rotation. Above are results from a numerical simulation of the top 100 Keep reading
Mediterranean Currents
Ocean currents play a major role in the weather and climate of our planet. This video shows a simulation of the surface ocean currents in the Mediterranean and Atlantic over Keep reading