What is the connection between gyres and the ocean?
Australian scientists have identified the missing deep ocean pathway – or ‘supergyre’ – linking the three Southern Hemisphere ocean basins in research that will help them explain more accurately how the ocean governs global climate. The new research confirms the current sweeping out of the Tasman Sea past Tasmania and towards the South Atlantic is a previously undetected component of the world climate system’s engine-room – the thermohaline circulation or ‘global conveyor belt’. Wealth from Oceans Flagship scientist Ken Ridgway says the current, called the Tasman Outflow, occurs at an average depth of 800-1,000 metres and may play an important role in the response of the conveyor belt to climate change. Published this month in Geophysical Research Letters the findings confirm that the waters south of Tasmania form a ‘choke-point’ linking the major circulation cells in the Southern Hemisphere oceans. “In each ocean, water flows around anticlockwise pathways or ‘gyres’ the size of ocean
Gyres are caused by the Coriolis effect; planetary vorticity along with horizontal and vertical friction, which determine the circulation patterns from the wind curl (torque). The Earth’s oceans have the following major gyres:[2] * North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre * North Pacific Subpolar Gyre o Contains the smaller Alaska Gyre * North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre o Gulf Stream, Labrador Current, East Greenland Current, North Atlantic Current, North Atlantic Equatorial Current. Contains the Sargasso Sea. * North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, also known as the North Pacific Gyre o This gyre comprises most of the northern Pacific Ocean. It is located between the equator and 50º N latitude and occupies an area of approximately ten million square miles (34 million km²).[clarification needed] The North Pacific Gyre has a clockwise circular pattern and comprises four prevailing ocean currents: the North Pacific Current to the north, the California Current to the east, the North Equatorial Current to th
This highlights a little-seen environmental problem: Scientists say the world’s oceans are increasingly filled with junk — everything from large items like refrigerators and abandoned yachts to small stuff like plastic bottles. Much of the ocean trash is plastic, which means it won’t go away for hundreds of years, if ever. And the problem has gotten so bad that soupy “garbage patches” have developed in several locations, called gyres, where ocean currents swirl. Sources: cnn.
