🌍 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 western edges of the basins. The Gulf Stream, the Kuroshio, the Agulhas and the Brazil Current appear as thin, intense ribbons hugging the continents. The rotation of the Earth crowds each basin's circulation against its western side, so these currents end up carrying enormous volumes of water in bands only about a hundred kilometres wide.

🧊 The Antarctic Circumpolar Current, a continuous ring at the bottom of the globe, the only current that circles the planet without ever meeting a coastline.

🔵 And the vast flat blue. The interiors of the subtropical gyres, where the surface water drifts at a few centimetres per second. Most of the ocean is like this. The energetic parts are the exception, not the rule.

The colour scale is logarithmic and spans more than three orders of magnitude: between the centre of a gyre and the core of an equatorial jet there is a factor of a thousand in energy. Without the log scale, only four or five features would be visible at all.

⬇️ Two things worth keeping in mind: this is the surface, and the circulation below is organised differently, in places flowing the opposite way. And this is the energy of the mean current over one year, not of the eddies that swirl around it, which is a different quantity and a different story.

The relief is a visual device to make the pattern readable, not real topography. Grey is land and areas without data.

Data: CMEMS MULTIOBS_GLO_PHY_MYNRT_015_003, total surface currents (geostrophic + Ekman)