Interesting bit: ‘black holes’ of the ocean…
by CJ | Sep 24, 2013 | Journal | 15 comments
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Huh. What if they’re compound lifeforms?
Define life.
By “compound lifeforms,” I believe Tommie was referring to compound or colony organisms, as she said by her examples below, or things like coral.
I don’t believe she was intending to say a weather process was itself alive, rather that there might be creatures inside or around that. An example might be the heat-loving and chemosynthetic organisms around undersea thermal vents. Or lifeforms adapted to hot springs or other exotic or primitive environments, where conditions are otherwise hostile to more common Earth life.
Then again, if there could be something that conforms to the conventional(?) definition of life from Biology 101, then it would have to be considered. (Such as viruses and other things that are “iffy” to decide if they are “alive” or not.
Come up with a definition, and there are usually going to be difficulties at the boundary conditions.
I wasn’t being dismissive. There is the “Gaea Hypothesis”.
My apologies, Paul; lack of sleep, I was more grouchy than usual.
Define mercy; I can’t. What I was thinking when I said that was of something like a lichen or a man-o-war.
They’re pretty big. A lot bigger than a breadbox.
They do have implications for hydrologists, for climate modeling, for weather forecasting, for planetary science, and for physicists and oceanographers.
A boat is tritely a hole in the ocean you pour money into, $100 million plus for an America’s Cup yacht. And the defending Oracle boat is black :). These AC72 class yachts aren’t your usual sailboats: they average more than twice the speed of the wind, using more of a main-wing than a mainsail; and the holes in the ocean are very small because they hydrofoil–hydrofoil!–reaching well over forty knots. They tack both upwind and downwind to keep the main-wing producing lift instead of just getting pushed by the wind. Highlights are on YouTube if you want to see the six ton craft lifting meters off the water on their foils. Wow.
Wow, indeed. I’ve been on the Channel hovercraft, which ride above the water. But a big sailboat, never, just little Alphas…
I used to race Lido 14s with my father. The Lido is a sloop with a lot of freeboard and fold-up centerboard and rudder so it can be landed in surf (though I’ve never performed the evolution). It has a big open cockpit, good for six if they’re friendly. A very light, lively, “crank” boat
I was pleased to see the AC boats performing the same maneuvers I used to: go over the start line at the earliest moment with the highest speed; steal the wind out of your opponent’s sails; round the marks with the least loss of speed–though, the AC boats have to drop off their hydrofoils and push their catamaran hulls through the water to turn.
And so, so fast! Ten NM in about 25 minutes, including those slow turns.
Having done some Oceanography coursework, I’d like to make a minor correction to the article. Northern Europe is warmed by the North Atlantic Drift, not the Gulf Stream. A matter of semantics, you say? The Gulf Stream originates in the Gulf of Mexico and travels up the Eastern Seaboard. When the cold Labrador Current hits it in the Grand Banks, it forces the warmer water further east. That is where oceanographers rename it the North Atlantic Drift.
Since I’ve been quite far out to sea, crossing the Atlantic on a ship, sailing around South America, plenty of trips around the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, I have yet to see any of these wonders, but then, my guess is that you wouldn’t know you were in one until you had crossed over the event horizon. There is no “blue light” to give away its presence, and the water doesn’t have a significant change of color to indicate where the eddy begins. I couldn’t even say that a ring of foam would be an indication, since these things are quite large if I read the article correctly. You’d almost have to be at some considerable altitude to see the formation, and even then, might not see it all, simply because of the fluid dynamics of seawater. There are currents at various depths, some of which run counter to each other, there are varying levels of salinity, temperature, velocity of the current, etc. The bottom of the ocean, the so-called “hadal zone”, runs about 28 degrees Fahrenheit. The water is drifting north from the Southern Ocean and wells up in the Arctic Ocean. It takes about 1200 years for a water molecule to drift from Antarctica to the Arctic Ocean, and then another 1200 years to drift back (if it’s not acted upon by an outside force).
I recall being out at sea and noticing that the water had a smooth, oily look to it, and never could understand why. Now, it’s my firm belief that those patches were upwellings of cold water, nutrient rich, and not always predictable in their locations.
ISTR an observation that before Krakatoa blew there were several observations that the ocean suface went all smooth and glassy.
I would tend to think that phenomenon would have something to do with wave mechanics, cancelling each other out wherever they met…..nothing to base that on, just a theory.
I’d be willing to bet on that. Harmonic tremors. St Helens did that before she blew, giving seismologists a way to ‘read’ an oncoming event, but not to tell its magnitude.
I’m “on-board” with that too! High frequency tremors (which water would transmit very well) would tend to disrupt the lower frequency wind waves, one thinks.