According to researchers from the University of Miami and ETH Zurich, some of the world's largest oceans eddies are mathematically equivalent to the black holes in outer space. However, these eddies are surrounded by such strong water paths that anything that goes in there will not escape. Our climate is impacted by some of these huge eddies that can be up to 150km in diameter that rotate and drift across the ocean.
The number of eddies is currently reported to be on the rise in the Southern Ocean. This will transport salt and warm water up north. Interestingly, this could moderate the negative impact of melting ice in a warming climate. But scientists have not been able to quantify the impact so far, because the specific boundaries of these swirling water bodies have yet to be detected.
George Haller who is an oceanography professor at the University of Miami, has come up with a solution to this problem. In a paper him and his co-workers published, they came up with a new mathematical technique to find water-transporting eddies with coherent boundaries. The challenge will be finding such eddies to target coherent water islands in a turbulent ocean.
The overall movement and rotation of the fluid motion seems to be quizzical to people looking on the inside and out of an eddy. Haller and a co-worker Beron-Vera were able to retain order in this mess by isolating coherent water islands from a order of satellite observations. Haller and Beron-Vera were surprised to discover that such coherent eddies turned out to be mathematically equivalent to black holes.
website: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130923114111.htm
picture: http://images.sciencedaily.com/2013/09/130923114111-large.jpg
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