More settled science: these whirlpools transport vast amount of water and heat vertically in the ocean, somewhat like hurricanes do for the atmosphere. It is fun to imagine “Trenberth’s missing heat” being sucked down one of these.
Via Yahoo News:
Satellites have shown two mysterious ‘black hole’ whirlpools in the South Atlantic ocean – ultra powerful “vortexes” which suck water down into the depths.
Two of the black holes – or “maelstroms” – have been sighted in three months by physicists from Zurich and Miami who have written a new paper using satellite altimetry to look for and identify these oceanic vortices. They write in their paper:
The South Atlantic ocean region in question is bounded by longitudes [14W, 9E] and latitudes [39S, 21S]. Using satellite altimetry data, we seek coherent Lagrangian vortices (black-hole eddies, for short) over a 90-day time period, ranging from 24 November 2006 to 22 February 2007.
The powerful vortices of current have been described as ‘maelstroms’ and are ‘mathematical analogues’ for black holes – which is to say they do exactly the same with water that black holes do with light. The discovery could give new insights into how oceanic currents transport debris and may even have implications for climate change studies.
The maelstroms are detected by their rotating edges, which the scientists found were reliable indicators of the vortex within, based on pioneering research carried out by Stephen Hawking on black holes:
‘Intuitively, one expects that any…vortex in the fluid must contain such a singularity in its interior, just as all black holes are expected to contain Penrose-Hawking singularities. This expectation turns out to be correct’.
The singularities, as they have been termed, last for months at a time, moving across the ocean without interference from other currents. Thus they can transport water of different temperatures and salinity to other areas of the ocean, potentially influencing the regional climate.
Haller and Beron-Vera found that the vortices transported water in a north-western direction 30% faster than had previously been reckoned – at a rate equating to 1.3 million cubic meters of water per second.
In addition, the maelstroms were found to occur four times deeper in the ocean than previously estimated; the study found examples as deep as 2000 meters below the surface.
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Here is the draft paper, final publication in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
Coherent Lagrangian vortices: The black holes of turbulence
G. Hallery and F. J. Beron-Vera (Received 13 May 2013; revised 18 July 2013; accepted 23 July 2013.)
We introduce a simple variational principle for coherent material vortices in two-dimensional turbulence. Vortex boundaries are sought as closed stationary curves of the averaged Lagrangian strain. Solutions to this problem turn out to be mathematically equivalent to photon spheres around black holes in cosmology. The uidic photon spheres satisfy explicit di erential equations whose outermost limit cycles are optimal Lagrangian vortex boundaries. As an application, we uncover super-coherent material eddies in the SouthAtlantic, which yield speci c Lagrangian transport estimates for Agulhas rings.
In this NASA visualization video (not part of the paper, but related) one can see quasi-permanent eddies throughout the south Atlantic.
Data sources: sea surface height from NASA’s Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1, and Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 satellite altimeters; gravity from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission; surface wind stress from NASA’s QuikScat mission; sea surface temperature from the NASA/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS; sea ice concentration and velocity from passive microwave radiometers; temperature and salinity profiles from shipborne casts, moorings and the international Argo ocean observation system.
Related articles
- Black Hole Analogue Discovered in South Atlantic Ocean (technologyreview.com)
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So we know how they got their funding.
Next will be how to explain these are man-made and haven’t been there for millennium.
A transport system for heat and trapped heat are two different things. There is no trapped heat measured to account for the massive difference between the GCMs and the climate record.
Well so now we know the secret of the Bermuda Triangle.
Who’d have thunk. My bathtub is a black hole generator. And my sink. And even the toilet.
http://www.sott.net/article/265248-Ultra-powerful-black-hole-whirlpools-seen-for-the-first-time-in-the-South-Atlantic has a very nice photo of a whirlpool in their version of this story. Only problem is that I think it’s way too small to be one of this whirlpools.
REPLY: I saw that image, but could not use it due to it being copyrighted by “Rex Features”. Just as well, you are correct that it is too small. – Anthony
Hey! dbstealey! They found where the plug was pulled!
“Haller and Beron-Vera found that the vortices transported water in a north-western direction 30% faster than had previously been reckoned – at a rate equating to 1.3 million cubic meters of water per second.”
Yet another example of how little we know (or knew) and of the significance of forces that are operable in nature. Yet some people are still convinced that by driving our SUV’s we’re overwhelming the system and singlehandedly deciding the future trajectory of climate.
Do they really need to use some idiot’s blabber about “singularities” as a prop for a report on an *observation*? Do observations need any props?
“…..which is to say they do exactly the same with water that black holes do with light.” Is this post-modern science in action or an unfortunately misleading publicity exercise?
Wouldn’t this make ocean temperature measurement difficult, assuming of course that the whirlpools are significant? It is a good thing the science is settled (no sarcasm intended).
Great insights – Who would have thought that the oceans follow the rules of fluid dynamics.
Often the first time Man observes something we forget that that doesn’t mean it is the first time it has happened. Some act like it. Learning something new about the oceans is a good thing. The subtle implication that it is a new door that the missing heat may have gone through is not a good thing.
Ric Werme says:
September 5, 2013 at 10:32 pm
http://www.sott.net/article/265248-Ultra-powerful-black-hole-whirlpools-seen-for-the-first-time-in-the-South-Atlantic
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From your link:
“The whirpools – never witnessed before – would suck down ships, debris and even living creatures, moving 1.3 million cubic metres of water per second. ”
If they’ve never been witnessed before, then how did Edgar Allen Poe write about them? He either heard about the existence of the maelstroms from someone, or made the whole thing up.
Ric and Anthony: when you say, “too small”, where do you imagine the boundary? For example, what is the extent of the whirlpool in your bathroom?
REPLY: based on water characteristics in the photo, this whirlpool looks to be on a scale of feet (my SWAG is a few tens of feet, maybe 10-30) due to the slope of the interior vortex. Water is heavy, bigger whirlpools such as mentioned in the paper would have less steep funnel slopes. This one in the SOTT.net article might be a photo of the Corryvreckan Whirlpool, see http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2404815 – Anthony
You know, it gets to a point where one just gets sick of studies that, sooner or later, insert a remark about that study’s importance in “understanding climate change”. This one is typical. One just can’t have an interesting discovery without it being related to ‘climate change’. “Climate CHANGE” is, by its very name, a ‘change’, which, in and of itself, is nothing, because it CHANGES. Yet it gets bandied around as a noun, or ‘thing’, that is a ’cause’, or something requiring ‘understanding’. Well, before Trenberth slimes this as his missing heat mechanism (I say ‘slimes’, not meaning that he’ll insult this study, but that he’ll glom onto it as his own vindication), climate ‘change’ is an EFFECT, not a cause. So once people figure that out maybe their focus can go elsewhere, and some pure science without an implied (or explicit in this case) agenda can actually take place.
As posted on another thread
Heat absorbed by the world oceans is moved around by the major currents, most notably by the Gulf Stream and its extension in the North Atlantic, Kuroshio-Oyashio currents system in the North Pacific and yhe equatorial currents in the Central Pacific.
In order to influence global climate these major currents (assuming relatively steady solar input) heat transport (current’s velocity, volume or both) has to change.
One could speculate about causes of such changes, either of the global or local proportions.
It is somewhat odd to think that a local cause is the primary factor, but from data I have looked at, that appear to be the case as listed here:
AMO – Far North Atlantic Tectonics
PDO – Kamchatka – Aleutian Archipelago Tectonics
ENSO (SOI) – Central Pacific Tectonics
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/TDs.htm
I’m going to wait for the US Navy or any nation’s navy, or any commercial shipping company to verify their ships have been spun anywhere by this phenomenon or stunning data from ARGO buoys that shows an unmistakable pattern of ship-sucking power marauding across the Atlantic.
My skepticism is against the notion that something that was previously unknown but with a paucity of information is deemed capable of sucking ships to Davy Jone’s locker BUT HASN’T! It’s not like there’s any shortage of these things if the article is to be believed, and stuff to suck in is everywhere, so where are the bodies?
Luther Wu says:
September 5, 2013 at 11:05 pm
> If they’ve never been witnessed before, then how did Edgar Allen Poe write about them?
One thing I came across while hunting down that photo (I had seen it a few days before) was a claim that Poe et al had exaggerated real whirlpools into their fiction.
See http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/02/science/deadly-maelstrom-s-secrets-unveiled.html
dp says:
September 5, 2013 at 11:16 pm
The eddies are very big, here are some on the Gulf Stream.
http://tornado.sfsu.edu/geosciences/classes/m407_707/Monteverdi/labs/Lab3_Oceanographers/Lab_3_Oceanography_Key.html
The ones in the S Atlantic are 100km to 300km across, so I doubt anyone on a ship, except perhaps the navigator would notice entering one.
I’m no astrophysicist but it is nothing like a Black Hole! A Black Hole has a gravity field so intense that light cannot escape – it’s not that it sucks light in (as such) as far as I understand it. A photon is a massless particle. It’s path can be bent by gravity, but as far as I am aware it won’t be ‘sucked in’. Would any physicist on here care to chime in?
Does this account say how they measured or detected these things down to 2000m below sea surface? I did not know that we had instruments capable of doing that.
How many of these things are there?
Because if they are common then ocean acidification from absorption of CO2 is going ot be very hard to detect.
They would confound that problem entirely, if they are common.
“Ric Werme says”
Your video looks like Saltstraumen in Nothern Norway?
@rRick Werne (11.16pm Sept 5:, Greta video thanks but I guess that is why they built the bridge??.
@Ferd Perple, My bath tub does not but it does have a Gulf Stream. (Well ok when I open the hot tap LOL),
At JM van Winkle , but is the science NOT settled ?? dang I won’t be able to sleep tonight. I thought in a week or two at this big meeting it is all done and over with!