An MIT Alumni Association Publication

Watch the Oceans Van Gogh

  • Amy Marcott
  • slice.mit.edu

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Take a look at NASA's Perpetual Ocean, a stunning visualization of worldwide ocean surface currents between June 2005 and December 2007. It stems from model output from the joint project between MIT and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II or ECCO2.

Here are the details, as noted on NASA's Perpetual Ocean website:

ECCO2 uses the MIT general circulation model (MITgcm) to synthesize satellite and in-situ data of the global ocean and sea-ice at resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow current systems, which transport heat and carbon in the oceans. ECCO2 provides ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualization. The dark patterns under the ocean represent the undersea bathymetry. Topographic land exaggeration is 20x and bathymetric exaggeration is 40x.
Is it me or is there a little post-Impressionism going on here?

Left: NASA's Perpetual Ocean. Right: The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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