Black hole in ocean plus#

Thus, for a boat sailing SSE for Bermuda, there is a big plus in sailing right through the western part of a cold eddy. A current of nine knots was reported in the 1984 Newport to Bermuda race. The most important feature of a cold eddy is its strong counterclockwise angular momentum that results in currents of two to three knots, and sometimes even greater. Once generated between the Gulf Stream and Bermuda, a cold eddy moves slowly westward/southwestward with a lifetime of perhaps six months to two years. These eddies are similarly caused by intrusions of cold shelf water north of the stream being cut off and forming eddies. Cold eddies have become known more recently.

Instabilities of the Gulf Stream result in bulges that, when they become large enough, are “pinched off” and become independent entities with clockwise angular momentum. The presence of warm eddies has been observed and understood for many decades. Nevertheless, by the start of the Bermuda Race on Friday, I felt confident that I knew enough to make best use of the strong currents of the cold eddy that was the focus of my attention. Unfortunately, gale-force winds prevented Jayhawk from traversing the critical regions of the cold eddy, so we did not have the benefit of that direct information on the position of the eddy. Jayhawk had planned to sail directly through the cold eddy and relay her observations to us. Also, when race day finally arrived, at the pre-race briefing, Jenifer Clark, who then worked for NOAA, presented her explanations and analyses of the entire Gulf Stream situation.Ī further, very specific effort to gain information on the eddies involved Bill Koch’s 90-foot sail yacht, Jayhawk, which had made the passage from Newport to Bermuda a few days earlier. To bolster confidence in the Gulf Stream analysis, Bill Koch, Matador’s owner and skipper, and Vincent Moyersoms, who managed the Matador program, had commissioned a group at the University of Rhode Island to provide an independent interpretation of the satellite and other data. The consequence was that I had long experience, much of it frustrating, in trying to understand, interpret, and extrapolate the sort of data that was now crucial to our Bermuda race success. Unfortunately, up-to-date satellite data was frequently unavailable, usually because of cloud cover during the satellite pass, and making a critical decision on old data was always chancy. Conversely, if the edge is far, you must not waste time and distance seeking it. If the edge is near, you must sail to it even if the heading is nearly perpendicular to the rhumb line. In that race, the position of the westerly edge of the Gulf Stream south of the Florida Keys, specifically Rebecca Shoal Light, was critical. I had considerable experience with this sort of data from some years of navigating the annual St.

Therefore, in March I began focusing on this cold eddy, extracting the position and size of the eddy from NOAA interpretations of satellite data. If so, it could be a considerable help to us, or it could hurt us terribly, depending upon how we sailed in its vicinity. This cold eddy was a prominent feature, and I anticipated that its slow movement westward would bring it near to our planned rhumb line. Throughout this planning I received NOAA satellite data on the surface temperatures of the Gulf Stream two or three times a week, depending on availability of observations. This was despite the fact that this particular cold eddy had dominated my pre-race planning that began three months in advance of the race. During the 1986 Newport to Bermuda Race, we ran afoul of a cold eddy that had a similar effect on Matador, an 84-foot maxi boat that was second to finish.Īs navigator for Matador, I experienced a bizarre and frustrating dilemma when we were drawn into the grip of this black hole cold eddy. In astronomy, a black hole is a region of space where gravity is so intense that even light can’t escape from it.

Black hole in ocean