01
The spirals
Each gyre is a smooth rotational field; particles fall inward and pool at the calm centre, exactly where the real oceans gather their floating debris.
The Global Ocean ConveyorField 128
Tens of thousands of particles trace the great subtropical gyres and the deep return: the thousand-year circuit that carries warm water poleward at the surface and hauls the cold back along the floor of the world, beneath every map you have ever read.
The unseen circuit / 01
Wind stacks the subtropical seas into vast rotating lenses — the gyres — clockwise in the north, anticlockwise in the south. Their western edges sharpen into the fastest rivers on Earth: the Gulf Stream, the Kuroshio, the Agulhas.
Where those warm currents reach the cold latitudes, the water gives up its heat, grows dense, and sinks — kilometres straight down — into a return flow no eye will ever see. That sinking pulls the whole surface along behind it. Cut it, and Europe loses its winters.
The field above is that circuit, made visible: particles carried by an analytic flow that spirals into the gyre centres and drains into the deep. Amber where the water runs warm and shallow, teal where it returns cold and deep.
Sun-warmed water riding the top few hundred metres, thrown poleward along the western boundary currents.
Dense, cold, oxygen-rich water sinking at the poles and creeping back along the abyssal plain for centuries.
How to read the map / 02
Each gyre is a smooth rotational field; particles fall inward and pool at the calm centre, exactly where the real oceans gather their floating debris.
Every particle leaves a fading trail. Where flow crowds together the trails braid into bright ribbons — the western boundary jets.
A slow curl of noise nudges the whole field so it is never quite the same twice — the ocean drifting under its own weather.