From: Amos - PM
Date: 21 Apr 08 - 02:40 AM

"IT'S amazing that nobody has spotted it before. Superimposed on every ocean on the planet there is a striped pattern of currents. Yet what causes them is a mystery.

While it may be that only a few people have mentioned it before, and so far as I've seen no one has done a detailed analysis, a very similar effect is seen at smaller scale in a number of different situations where it seems fairly well understood.

If there is a flow in one direction (here due to wind and tides) there must be a counterflow in the opposite direction to keep the water from accumulating, piling up, and tipping over on things. The resulting "stripes of flow" may occur sometimes between vertically stacked layers, but in open large bodies are expected to occur in areas laterally separated from each other.

The behavio(u)r is expected. All that's really left is for someone to run the numbers (and show that their set of numbers predicts "reality" to an acceptable degree).

Or so it would seem.

(The analysis for a simplified - smaller - device was assigned as homework in one of my Sophomore classes. Hardly anyone got it all right. I asked god for help, but he was still in short pants and hadn't progressed to partial differentials in compressible¹ flows.)

¹ Same math mostly works with density gradients.

John