Image of the week : vertical extent of Gulf Stream

 

data: HYCOM, from NOAA server; visualization: ParaView

data link: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/thredds-coastal/catalog/hycom_sfc/20201201/catalog.html

This animation changes the viewing perspective to highlight how shallow the Gulf Stream (red) is.

Ocean current speeds exceeding 1.2 m/s are shaded in red; in this domain, the primary current is the Gulf Stream. Data is for 12 May 2021.

Note that the vertical distances are greatly exaggerated (x625) :

maximum depth is around 8 km whereas the horizontal extent shown is around 5000 km.

other view from the same author with less exaggeration : Mathew Barlow

 

"There is a river in the ocean. In the severest draughts it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never overflows," Matthew Maury on the Gulf Stream; here in the 1785 'Le Rouge' French version of the Benjamin Franklin/Timothy Folger chart of 1768.

Harvard Library 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : What is the Gulf Stream? /  This Old Map: Benjamin Franklin's Gulf Stream, 1786  / Gulf Stream diverted more than 100 Miles North in 2011 / Atlantic Ocean circulation at weakest in a millennium, say scientists