Giant whirlpools in Atlantic Ocean puzzle scientists

They are moving in the ocean like giant frisbees, two discs thrown into the air.

I'm not a sientist, but what comes to my mind when I read this is:

when you push something through the water (like a paddle or something) there will be also 2 moving whirlpools
in the water.

just a thought.

Or atlantis is rising again :-)

I just want to debunk the picture, not the phenomena.

Look at the date:

Hi
Im a new recruit to ATS. Love the site. Full of interesting tidbits of information.
The 400 km whirlpool does indeed seem to be true if Discovery.com is reliable enough for you. The article is dated March 23rd 2011

The article also states that Guilherme Castelao and Bill Johns are real too. It seems that the scientists have known about the whirlpools for some time but have now got enough data to see that the whirlpools are acting slightly strange. It also mentions that they are a danger to oil rigs.

These rings of circulating ocean, spin-offs from the North Brazil Current, have been known to researchers for several years, but Guilherme Castelao and Bill Johns at Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science have looked more closely at the structure and behavior of 10 rings sampled between 1998 and 2000.

On average, they swirl at a speed of 2 knots (nautical miles per hour) which "is very fast for an ocean current," Johns said in an email. "They are about 400 km (250 miles) across in diameter, which makes them the biggest such eddies in the oceans."

They have a huge effect on navigation," said Johns. "If ships were aware of them, they could probably save considerable money on fuel by using them to their advantage." The great swirls "can wreak havoc on oil rigs that are deployed off the Trinidadian coast," he said, "so they keep a close eye on them

Catching the Worlds largest frisbie at sea

Right, im off to bed. Just in case the link does not work. here it is again

news.discovery.com...

Peace to you all
Quaid

reply to post by Quaid

Thank you so much! I've been googling my ass off trying to find a legit source. You saved my thread good sir haha. Looks like this is the real deal fellas.

EDIT: Anyone know why I can't edit my original post? Wanted to add the discovery link.

news.discovery.com...

Originally posted by Ear-Responsible
reply to post by Quaid

 

Thank you so much! I've been googling my ass off trying to find a legit source. You saved my thread good sir haha. Looks like this is the real deal fellas.

EDIT: Anyone know why I can't edit my original post? Wanted to add the discovery link.

news.discovery.com...

edit on 14-4-2011 by Ear-Responsible because: (no reason given)

Thanks Ear_Responible. Much appreciated. I have been reading the forums on this site for a few months now but did not have much to add myself so never joined up. I saw this thread and decided to join up to relay the info about the whirlpools.

Its good to finally take the plunge and join the good people at ATS.

Right, defo off to bed now.
Laters

Originally posted by ManBehindTheMask
Common sense dictates that if these things were real, they would be ALL OVER the news.....theres no way that two 250mile wide whirlpools would escape the MSN......

Not to mention the massive loss of ships and life it would cause........

Sorry not buying it

Common sense aye? Looks like it's been verified

reply to post by Quaid

Welcome aboard I feel honored that you joined just to verify what I couldn't. Much thanks. And goodnight rest easy.

Originally posted by Ear-Responsible
reply to post by Quaid

 

Welcome aboard

I feel honored that you joined just to verify what I couldn't. Much thanks. And goodnight

rest easy.

Yes, thanks Quaid, it's nice to see that it's not totally fictitious!

But I wouldn't go so far as to say it's verified, I think they stretched the truth.

First, the word "whirlpool" doesn't appear anywhere in the discovery.com article, so I'm not sure why they don't use that word, but it could be due to the slow speed:

Second, they say it's moving at 2 nautical miles per hour, so it certainly doesn't look anything like the picture. So I must say finding the discovery.com source has done little to dispel the notion that pravda is unreliable, if anything it confirms it. But it's not totally fictitious, there really are some rotating currents in that location! But nothing like the photo. In fact the article implies that ships may not even be aware of it but if they were they could use the 2 knot current to their advantage.

Hi
It certainly is an intriguing phenomenon but I do think that the Discovery article is quite vague. It only briefly mentions that it is strange in this following quote.

Sharp turns in currents sometimes give off similar independent circular features elsewhere in the oceans, such as the warm eddies that break off from the Gulf Stream as it travels from the eastern shore of the United States across the Atlantic, but Johns tells Discovery News that the rings formed by the North Brazil Current are different.

Also, I would have liked a bit more information about when they mentioned how they have been studying 10 of these whirlpools since 1998 to 2000.

These rings of circulating ocean, spin-offs from the North Brazil Current, have been known to researchers for several years, but Guilherme Castelao and Bill Johns at Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science have looked more closely at the structure and behavior of 10 rings sampled between 1998 and 2000.

Are these giant 400 km whirlpools included in that data and in a sense, are common events or have they formed recently and therefore been compared against the existing data and found to be different?

I suppose this part of the article partialy answers my question (should have read it better the first time). It's basically saying that the whirlpools are bigger, faster and higher than previous research led them to believe. So maybe these two giant whirlpools are just larger variations to the ones they have already studied?

The authors described the rings as "solid, clockwise-rotating parcels of water enclosed within a band of lower-speed water that tends to protect them from the surrounding environment. Overall, this research has established that the NBC (North Equatorial Countercurrent) rings seem to be bigger, faster, and taller than previous observations suggested."

It will be intersting to see how this pans out in the long run but like many strange events that happen, it may just be forgotten in a few months time.

reply to post by Ear-Responsible


Clearly a hoax, considering that would be roughly visible from space. And I'm looking at the sats right now. Not there.

reply to post by Gorman91

Clearly a hoax? You might wanna read the entire thread before embarrassing yourself

Originally posted by ExPostFacto
I'm sorry but this seems to be a hoax. Compare the Japan Tsunami whirlpool at about 40 seconds into the video, with the photo attached to the story. The timing alone seems to give caution, and apparently this news source has been known in the past to hoax material.

edit on 12-4-2011 by ExPostFacto because: (no reason given)

Greetings;

The whirlpools appear to being different directions; clockwise for the photo in question




and counter-clockwise for Japan whirlpool.



Is this because they are supposedly on either side of the equator?

In Peace, Love & Light
tfw

Originally posted by Flavian
"In addition, marine water contains many charged ions, Na and Cl for example. To crown it all, water molecules are dipoles that are charged both positively and negatively.

Any dipole starts spinning when moving in the magnetic field. An oceanic ring gathers millions of billions of molecules together."

I am no scientist but is this the answer? We keep hearing about the increase in magnetic activity and (amongst others) the south atlantic anomaly. Im sure i heard recently that there are more of these anomolies over the world as well so maybe its just perfectly natural and nothing to worry about?

Greetings Flavian:

Now, we think you are, indeed, on to something.

Stars & Flags!

Consider this;

How about an overlay of the various reports of "magnetic anomalies" (new magnetic poles developing) and these whirlpools? That would make for an interesting perspective, IMHO.

If the OP's report is true, that means that whirlpool - at 400 kilometers - is 250 miles in diameter.

How many of these this large have been reported in history?

Be right back with more info along this line.

In Peace, Love & Light
tfw

Heres a few possible explanations that I can think of..
1. Big crack/hole opens up in the sea floor and water drains in the crust. (If this is the case than I'm curious to what the depth of the water is at that area of the ocean, if its a pretty big distance than that must be some hole to cause a whirlpool to reach the surface.)

2. Secret government project/experiment.

3. Alien activity.

4. Underwater star gate.

5. Combination of 2, 3 and/or 4.

6. Some unknown force?

So yeah two questions to anyone who can answer, first, where in the ocean did this take place and what is the water depth? And second, what is the diameter of the whirlpool, how big was this thing?

Originally posted by infojunkie2
reply to post by Ear-Responsible

 

Something really weird is going on, yall remember last year all the sinkholes with most of them being perfectly round, seems be connected.

The bible does say that in the last days, there will be signs in the earth, sun, moon and stars,
and even mentions the sea with the waves roaring.

Greetings:

And we, too, agree with the riddle of why "all the sinkholes with most of them being perfectly round" was not questioned by anyone?

A sinkhole, also known as a sink, shake hole, swallow hole, swallet, doline or cenote, is a natural depression or hole in the Earth's surface caused by karst processes — the chemical dissolution of carbonate rocks or suffosion processes for example in sandstone. Sinkholes may vary in size from 1 to 600 meters (3.3 to 2,000 ft) both in diameter and depth, and vary in form from soil-lined bowls to bedrock-edged chasms. Sinkholes may be formed gradually or suddenly, and are found worldwide. The different terms for sinkholes are often used interchangeably. Wiki

OK. We'll chase the rabbit down this hole.

Karst topography is a landscape shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, usually carbonate rock such as limestone or dolomite.

Due to subterranean drainage, there may be very limited surface water, even to the absence of all rivers and lakes. Many karst regions display distinctive surface features, with sinkholes or dolines being the most common. However, distinctive karst surface features may be completely absent where the soluble rock is mantled, such as by glacial debris, or confined by a superimposed non-soluble rock strata. Some karst regions include thousands of caves, even though evidence of caves that are big enough for human exploration is not a required characteristic of karst.

A karst landscape in Minerve, Hérault, France

Interesting - but no cigar. Nothing there even approximates almost perfect circular erosion.
Nowhere is there even a hint of a theory as to why the sinkholes are perfectly round.

Probably all those missed shots by the particle beam weapons in the ongoing war in space. BTW, what's the score?


A 65-foot-deep sinkhole opened in the eastern German town of Schmalkalden on Monday.
The sinkhole measured over 130 feet (40 meters) across, forcing the evacuation of 25 people in nine houses.

On November 1, a hole which is 30 meters in diameter and 20 meters deep opened up in the eastern German town of Schmalkalden, around 75 miles north-east of Frankfurt. It swallowed a car and parts of a garage and forced the evacuation of 25 people. It was reported that from 10,000 to 12,000 cubic meters of soil had slipped. The cause of the crater is yet unclear. According to Jürgen Reinholz, the environment and agriculture minister for the state of Thuringia, there was a natural cause for the landslide. The region is subject to landslides due to its geological makeup. A two-meter deep crater opened in the town of Tiefenort in January, leading to five houses become uninhabitable. source

And we bring the focus home to America.

Cedarshole at Cedars of Lebanon State Park

Cedars of Lebanon State Park is also a neat place to learn about sinkholes, which are places where water filters into the ground for so long that eventually the ground collapses. Because it is so flat, and because there is limestone immediate under the soil, there are sinkholes all over this part of Tennessee. So watch your step! source

One might question what might happen if New Madrid or Yellowstone goes ballistic.

Are these sinkholes connected in some way to other underground anomalies?

Does this provide a pathway for "stuff" to exit if the Earth is squeezed somewhere else?

What about those hot springs westcoast is writing about in one of his fine threads?

And now, we go to China.


A sinkhole on a highway in Quzhou, Zhejiang province of China on 22 June 2010. source

We need some of the heavyweights on ATS to take notice here and add color.

Earthquake activity is skyrocketing, food shortages and riots abound worldwide, and I'm guessing the economy will continue tanking and Yellowstone is rumbling ominously. All we need is an early fire season to really mess things up and the locusts in Sudan and Saudi Arabia to decide to vacation in a more populated area - or farmland.

And floods! This year may be the worst yet here in America considering past history in relation to the snowpack. We also will need to continue to watch where the quakes are showing up worldwide, especially the "ring of fire." These websites will help. The odds are looking at Alaska to California to be something to watch.

IRIS Seismic Monitor

U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program

Live Internet Seismic Server

Global Seismic Monitor

In Peace, Love & Light
tfw

reply to post by thorfourwinds


Thanks for all the info, and it does seem very suspect about the holes being perfectly round and the partical beams being round as well, just like the ones we sometime see on doppler, do you think that maybe these holes were created during a time of testing and getting the bugs out of what ever created these holes, in order to go on to bigger and better things like weather modification and quakes?

reply to post by Ear-Responsible


Can you see it on satalite pictures? If no, then it is a hoax. I cannot. Thus it is a hoax.

reply to post by Gorman91


you do know that those pictures are probably not real time, dont you??

Originally posted by Gorman91
reply to post by Ear-Responsible

 

Can you see it on satalite pictures? If no, then it is a hoax. I cannot. Thus it is a hoax.

Uh, deny ignorance much? I can't see it so it must be fake! Haha are you kidding me? Please if you have nothing to add other than laughs, refrain from posting here. Thank you.

reply to post by bourbon2nite


You do realize that a whirlpool is, don't you?