⚡ The other half of the ocean’s energy

This globe maps the kinetic energy carried by ocean eddies: not the average current, but the swirls that form around it. Every mesoscale eddy detected by satellite altimetry between 1993 and 2023 contributes, and where that energy is high the surface bulges outward.

🌀 The ocean’s weather, three and a half years of it

Every dot is a mesoscale eddy: a rotating body of water tens to hundreds of kilometres across, tracked by satellite altimetry from the dip or bulge it makes in the sea surface. Only eddies that survived at least 90 days are shown, and even so there are more than two thousand alive on any given day.

🌍 The ocean's horsepower, mapped

This globe shows the mean kinetic energy of the ocean surface in 2025: how much energy the average current carries at each point. It is the same field as our particle animation, seen as a landscape instead of as flow. Where the water moves fast, the surface bulges outward; where it barely moves, it stays flat.

⚡ The equatorial band. A bright, narrow ridge running the width of every basin. The equatorial current system is the fastest and the most orderly flow in the ocean.

🌊 The ocean's surface, as it flowed through 2025

Every trace is a virtual particle carried by the mean surface current of 2025. The colour and the length of the trail both show speed: long and red means fast, short and blue means slow.

⚡ The equatorial current system runs as a set of narrow, almost perfectly straight ribbons. Nowhere else does water move so fast in such an orderly way.