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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Well about 200 ships sink every year (4/week) and about 24 of them (2/month) are over 100 ft long. A percentage of those ships are lost without a trace and presumed lost to bad weather.
It was only recently that marine engineers started to take rogue waves seriously after getting video documentation of waves striking ships and oil platforms, which finally resulted in satellite documentation that rogue waves are far more common that previously believed.
There is no good reason to suspect that like rogue waves these have been there all along and have been discounted as drunken sailor stories rather than fact.
Rogue waves are another example of a natural phenomen that the “models” said were impossible or extremely rare only to find that once you know what to look for they can be seen almost every day someplace on the oceans, and marine engineering models for maximum wave height are grossly off the mark when it comes to these extreme waves.
Does know if an argo buoy has gone “down” one of these?
Corryvreckan is another fairly famous maelstrom
Outside of the fact that Black Holes are a perversion of mathematics,
“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. ”
Light does NOT come back out of a mythical black hole but water certainly does survive the descent in a maelstrom and comes out later.
These maelstrom are so new this gentleman was blogging about the legal implications for cruise ship passengers back in May!!
http://blog.lipcon.com/2013/05/what-is-a-maelstrom-and-how-can-it-affect-your-cruise-vacation.html
Here is a NYT article from 1997
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/02/science/deadly-maelstrom-s-secrets-unveiled.html
etc etc
Oceans floor profile was formed by the tectonic plates movements over millions of years. The mid Atlantic ridge imprint of the ocean floor speeding is clearly visible in the Earth’s crus magnetic field. Similarity of the Gulf Stream surface flow and the Atlantic ocean’s floor magnetic profile patterns is clearly visible
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GMF-GS.htm
Tectonics is a continuous and relentless process, it is happening now as it was millions of years ago and it will in Mega years to come. From our geological epoch time point it may appear to be of no immediate consequence, but the available data evidence points to the contrary.
What happens when the moon passes over these ?
God help us! What’s happened to the sun!
Some years ago there was a TV programme about vortices which started at the Corryvreckan Whirlpool and investigated it in a lot of detail, even thowing a dummy into it on the end of a long line to see the effect. It took out about a half mile of line in short order.
At the end of the programme they showed some new, then, satellite photos which showed that vortices were a world-wide phenomenon, which no-one had got round to observing or studying in ant depth.
(Incidently, anyone who fishes a dry fly for trout finds out about vortices very quickly, otherwise they catch few trout. Often you see a mini whirlpool remain static for some second or minutes, and then it suddenly spins off across the river current and settles elsewhere.)
[snip – way waaaaaayyyyy of topic – mod]
Reminds me of the big “Red Eye”-storm on Saturn…
According to etymology the term ‘Maelstrom’ is from the Dutch – grinding stream – and was used by Mercator and other map makers in the 1500’s. So yes – satellite imagery has been used to show that Mercator was right.
Luther Wu says:
September 5, 2013 at 11:05 pm
The original Maelstrom (described by Poe and others) is the Moskstraumen, a powerful tidal current in the Lofoten Islands off the Norwegian coast.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maelstrom
Would anyone dare to claim that they can model this phenomenon with any accuracy in their GCMs? ‘Settled science’ is bovine excrement.
I am way out of my depth (sorry) but read everything i can on this site. Dumb question but would not moving all this water to depths of up to 2000 feet use up vast amounts of energy and what are the implications, if any?
i’m sorta glad i’m not an ocean bottom dweller with all those aquatic
‘tornadoes’ going overhead … could be a dizzy experience..
I have NO doubt whatsoever, that they will leap upon this as the heat-transfer mechanism for the deep oceans……
“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.”
Inaccurate reporting by Yahoo ( who would rely on something called ‘Yahoo” to get science right?) . This is an apparently measured result that was cited from an earlier paper by someone else.
peter says:
I am way out of my depth (sorry) but read everything i can on this site. Dumb question but would not moving all this water to depths of up to 2000 feet use up vast amounts of energy and what are the implications, if any?
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The paper makes no mention of vertical transport of water. In fact the definition of these zones as being “coherent” means that volumes of water to not get deformed and stretched. This is precisely what happens near a vortex which is sucking material down.
Though they do talk of “singularities” this seems to be rather loose parlance since this would be an infinitely deep whole of infinitesimal width. While Hawkins may want to suggest that happens in black holes it certainly does not happen on Earth.
There’s some very sloppy language in this paper despite it’s fancy maths, including referring to 2D patterns on water as “photon spheres” !
Since “black holes” always makes exciting pop science journalism, it seems this is designed to get their paper talked about. I really dislike this sort of sloppy sensational language in something that is supposed to be a serious scientific paper.
Also beware of language like “depths of up to 2000 feet “, of-up-to’s don’t tell us anything useful, more sensationalism (which came from another paper about another ocean).
PS the fact that they don’t mention vertical transportation suggests it is insignificant in these structures, otherwise it would have as important to report on as the horizontal transportation. As I noted above the usual imagery of a maelstrom would be a vortex characterised by incoherent patterns which is what they explicitly deselect.
Well it does give the warmists a (barely believable) explanation (face saver) for how 17 years worth of heat disappeared from the atmosphere and reached the deep oceans – but since the water heats up down there so slowly it gives us an another reason to point out there is no problem: The temperature rise (as measured/claimed by the warmists) in the deep oceans only rises by a few hundredths of a degree over decades – it is hardly likely that this trapped heat will cause major changes or extreme weather (even when it reaches the surface).
I agree this has nothing to do with science, but the news editors and politicians never have been much interested in the science. This global warming story is becoming boring, even for them, and they need a way of disengaging so that they can move on to a new more creditable alarmist agenda. Any guesses what they will choose to latch on to?
A source of maelstroms, or just underwater heating and potentially global warming?
Paging Bob Tisdale, Master of the Sea Temperature Charts: Is this close enough to the Pacific Warm Pool to have some correlation with ENSO and other things?
Although you did mention how, regionally speaking, it’s “East Pacific Versus The Rest Of The World”, that region which is about 33% of the global ocean surface area hasn’t warmed for 31+ years and ignores ENSO events, while everywhere else has “global warming” that’s aligned with ENSO. Could this uber-volcano be having a stabilizing effect? Is there any correlation, positive or negative?
What the paper seems to be describing is a coherent lump of water that doesn’t mix with the surrounding waters (analogous to Jupiter’s Red Spot as they suggest at the end) rather than what I imagined they were on about – a funnel moving surface water to deeper regions.
These have been known for years and caused by ocean currents passing through quieter water. They were known as eddy currents now they are maelstroms. (Itself an alarmist term).They have helped form the ocean gyres, larger eddy currents that are positioned semi-permanently and collect all the crap thrown overboard from ships. The Southern Pacific Gyre is said to contain several million tonnes of non-degradable plastics. Take your rubbish home with you.
Eddy currents are a friction condition whilst black holes are a gravity condition. No comparison to my mind.
The analogy with black holes is very poor and inappropriate. What happens to the water is not “exactly the same … as black holes do with light.” It is not trapped forever, compressed into a singularity; it is (putatively) moved around to other areas. Big deal; tell us something new. Water moves.
It takes a huge amount of power to pump 27°C surface water down 1000m, about the same as pumping that same water up 4m in height. Or speeding that same water up to 20mph. This is most definitely not happening.
There is no mechanism that allows for warm water to sink in the oceans. Only water at around 4°C or colder water with higher salinity can sink into the deep ocean. Aside from that you get some heat transport in top 1-200 hundred meters from wave action (storms, or their absence can have massive effect on moving heat down) and very small amount from conductivity, and a really small amount from fish swimming up and down.
Now we know the real cause of the Bermuda Triangle.