You know I love a good visualization and this one of the Southern Ocean is no slouch. I forgive the somewhat standard narration for the shear beauty of the phenomena illustrated. Circulation, eddies, deep water formation, isopycnals. It’s got it ALL. Seriously, check out the waterfalls of super dense water flowing off the continental shelf at the edge of the Ross Sea at 1:30 min. And the spread of Antarctic Bottom Water along the Atlantic seafloor, it’s like the Oobleck. Just the beautiful, dynamical, oxygen-laden, cold and salty version. How does one make such an impressively high-resolution animation? With awesome output from an ocean model run on Australia’s most powerful supercomputer of course! Scientists from the ANU hub of ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science ran the model, and dataviz experts from the National Computational Infrastructure’s VizLab team made it pretty. Enjoy!
Source:
Big data reveals glorious animation of Antarctic bottom water
