🌊 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.

🌀 Everywhere else, currents meander. Look away from the equator and the flow bends, folds and curls. That difference is not decoration: at the equator the Coriolis effect vanishes, and without it the instabilities that make currents wander cannot grow the same way.

🧊 The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the bright band that circles the bottom of the map without ever meeting a coast. It is the largest current on the planet, the only one that goes all the way around, and the link that connects the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

🌊 Along the western margins of the ocean basins, the flow concentrates into narrow, fast jets: the Gulf Stream, the Kuroshio, the Agulhas, the Brazil Current. The rotation of the Earth crowds the circulation of each basin against its western edge, so these currents end up carrying enormous volumes of warm water poleward in ribbons only a hundred kilometres wide.

🏝️ On the opposite side, along the eastern margins, the currents are slower but remarkably persistent. These are the upwelling systems, off Northwest Africa, Namibia, California and Peru, where surface water is pushed offshore and cold, nutrient-rich water rises to replace it. They are among the most productive waters on the planet, and the Canary Islands sit inside one of them.

⬇️ One caveat that matters: this is the surface. A few hundred metres down the picture is different, and deeper still it can even run the opposite way. The ocean is not one sheet of moving water, it is a stack of layers, each with its own circulation.

Grey is land and the areas without data.

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