See How Deepest Ocean Currents Move

Deep in the Southern Ocean lies the densest and coldest water on the planet. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t moving.

On the contrary, a vividly detailed animation of deep ocean currents, created by Australian scientists with the help of their country’s most powerful supercomputer, reveals a deep-sea world that’s full of dynamic activity.

It shows underwater ocean storms generated by eddies, waterfalls of cold dense water that plummet off the Antarctic Continental Shelf into the abyss and underwater waves more than a mile high.

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"Scientists who have seen the visualization have been astonished at the level of detail,” Andy Hogg, an associate professor and ARC Future Fellow at Australian National University, said in a release. Hogg is also a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

The animation required so much data that it took seven hours to process a single second of the finished product.

But the animation is more than just a bunch of pretty pictures. “Being able to actually see how the bottom water moves in three dimensions rather than just looking at numerical, two-dimensional outputs has already opened new areas for scientific research,” Hogg said.

By peeling away the surface layer of water, the animation shows how the cold, dense water produced off the Antarctic coastline spreads out into the rest of the world’s ocean basins. The water’s extreme density and coldness drive many important currents in the ocean basins connected to the Southern Ocean.

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The water movement also helps the planet to cope with global warming driven by human burning of fossil fuels. As water near the surface is drawn deep, it takes with it heat and carbon that otherwise would have been returned to the atmosphere.

 ”The inhospitable climate of Antarctica and the lack of sustained observations of the ocean in this region over a significant period of time adds to the importance of using ocean models to create visualizations like these,” Hogg explained.

From Hogg’s web page, here’s a more detailed explanation of Southern Ocean circulation.