NASA Visualizes the Ocean Currents in Movement: A Mesmerizing View of Earth’s Underwater Highways

The mes­mer­iz­ing video above allows you to visu­al­ize the ocean cur­rents world wide. Utilizing information from area­craft, buoys, and oth­er mea­positive­ments, the visu­al­iza­tion exhibits the ocean in movement, with the cur­rents cre­at­ing Van Gogh-like swirls across the globe.

Accord­ing to NASA, “the ocean has been [his­tor­i­cal­ly] dif­fi­cult to mod­el. Sci­en­tists strug­gled in years previous to sim­u­late ocean cur­rents or accu­charge­ly pre­dict fluc­tu­a­tions in tem­per­a­ture, salin­i­ty, and oth­er prop­er­ties. Consequently, mod­els of ocean dynam­ics speedy­ly diverged from actual­i­ty, which meant they may solely professional­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion for temporary peri­ods.” This all modified, how­ev­er, when NASA and oth­er half­ners devel­oped ECCO, brief for “Esti­mat­ing the Cir­cu­la­tion and Cli­mate of the Ocean.” “By apply­ing the legal guidelines of physics to information from mul­ti­ple satel­lites and thou­sands of float­ing sen­sors, NASA sci­en­tists and their col­lab­o­ra­tors constructed ECCO to be an actual­is­tic, detailed, and con­tin­u­ous ocean mod­el that spans many years.” “The mission professional­vides mod­els which can be one of the best pos­si­ble recon­struc­tion of the previous 30 years of the glob­al ocean. It permits us to beneath­stand the ocean’s phys­i­cal course of­es at scales that aren’t nor­mal­ly observ­ready.” Watch above as years of ocean information come to life in a crisp, com­pelling visu­al­iza­tion.

through Snigger­ing Squid

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