Waltzing with God's Oceans

A stunning new animated video — produced as a joint project between MIT and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean — showcases the flow of the world's ocean currents swirling in captivating splendor. The video, titled "Perpetual Ocean," takes an astronaut's view, as if the viewer is in a waltz-like dance orbiting around the Earth. I feel like I'm waltzing with God's Oceans!

It shows ocean currents created with data from NASA satellites. In the video you can see how bigger currents like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean and the Kuroshio in the Pacific carry warm waters across thousands of kilometers at speeds greater than six kilometers per hour (4 mph), as well as seeing how thousands of other ocean create slow-moving, circular pools called eddies.

This video was created for a project called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, (ECCO) and the data are being used to quantify the ocean’s role in the global carbon cycle, to understand the recent evolution of the polar oceans, to monitor time-evolving heat, water, and chemical exchanges within and between different components of the Earth system, and for many other science applications.

NASA says “the visualization offers a realistic study in both the order and the chaos of the circulating waters that populate Earth’s oceans.”