Scientists Discover 'Black holes' in Turbulent Oceans

Researchers from the University of Miami and ETH Zurich have discovered that ocean eddies on Earth are similar to the black holes in space.

A new mathematical technique to examine the water eddies with coherent boundaries was devised by George Haller, Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at ETH, and Francisco Beron-Vera, Research Professor of Oceanography at the University of Miami.

The researchers traced such eddies in coherent water islands in turbulent oceans like the Southern Ocean. The violent motions of the water in such oceans appear to be extremely chaotic inside as well as outside the water eddy.

The researchers used satellites to spot such coherent eddies and observed that they were mathematically equivalent to black holes.

"Mathematicians have been trying to understand such peculiarly coherent vortices in turbulent flows for a very long time", Haller explained in a press release.

Some eddies have circular water paths, which trap whatever comes in the way. Black holes portray the same phenomenon, they gulp everything that exists in their surroundings and don't let anything escape, not even light.

The light sucked in by the black hole reaches a point when it stops spiraling, it bends and returns to its usual position and forms a circular orbit.

Haller and Beron-Vera discovered a similar closed barrier around selected ocean eddies. In these barriers, fluid particles move around in closed loops similar to the path of light in a photon sphere. And as in a black hole, nothing can escape from the inside of these loops, not even water.

These blackhole- like ocean eddies are stable and transport micro-organisms, other waste materials like oil and plastic and water with differing heat and salt content.

The scientists observed Agulhas Rings, which refer to a group of ocean eddies emerging regularly in the Southern Ocean off  the southern tip of Africa and transport warm, salty water northwest.

Seven Agulhas Rings of the black-hole type, which transported the same body of water without leaking for almost a year, were identified by the researchers.

Similar coherent vortices exist in other complex flows outside of the ocean, Haller stated.