How Ocean Currents Work - podcast episode cover

How Ocean Currents Work

Jun 04, 201538 min
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Episode description

It's easy to overlook the importance of ocean currents - they move along out at sea, while we stay mostly on land. But we are globally affected by them every day. Currents form the base of the food chain, drive weather and keep life as we know it going.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry and this is Stuff you Should Know, the one about ocean currents. We should start titling our episodes like Friends did. Yeah, the one where Ross talks about ocean currents. Yeah, the one where Chuck's eyes glazed over. I love this stuff, man, Like Earth science really gets me jazz. That's good, it

really does. Like it's so like, it's very detailed. There's a lot to it. It's often oversimplified, but it's also very understandable. And when you really like learn about it, you realize what an elegant system the whole thing is. Sure, maybe not necessarily a living organism, but I could see how someone would characterize it as such. I like that. It's good intro. Yeah, that's what I got. Uh so, Yes, tidal ocean currents, well, not tidal, that's part of the

ocean currents. It's a type of current. It's under the current umbrella. I've misspoken the first ten seconds. I think it's funny that in this article the word current refers to the motion of water when speaking of water? Is that what it says when speaking of water, the word current refers to the motion of the water. Yeah, it was a little clumsy Miriam's defines. Yeah, uh, well, this

is about ocean currents. Are all kinds of currents, river currents, Yeah, you know, there's currents in marshes and swamps and currents all over the place. But this is about ocean currents. Yeah, as long as water is not stagnant, there's currents present. And if it's stagnant, it's bad news Jack mosquitoes disease. Sure, But then again, you can make the case that if it's not stagnant, if if there's a current, it'll carry your car away in the blink of an eye. I

don't even think about it. Boy, did you see the photos of the Downtown Connector the other day in Atlanta when it flooded. Apparently the storm drains backed up in the downtown Connector of Atlanta was a lake. Wow, Like it literally stopped traffic. I can believe that. Yeah, people in Atlanta don't know how to drive in the rain to begin with. Oh, I don't know about that really. Yeah, that's all we do was driving the rain man. People

in l A don't have to driving the rain. Seems to me like everybody's brain just drops a couple of years when rain starts, and everyone starts like bumping into everybody else and like driving it two miles an hour, and you just like pedal to the metal. What's different

all the time. I got good tires. Yeah, Look, because you liked our stores, right, I don't like tip stores, but I'm willing to spend time there to get good tires that move water away from my car so I can if I have really fast no matter what the weather, you should start your I want to point out. Jerry just sighed heavily at this tangent. I think your retirement business should be Josh's tire house. Yeah, and then have a really sweet setup. Would be like fine tires. Just

here's like no place else on earth. Oh yeah, you got WiFi. You got a coffee machine? Well there's well no, I mean a baristah, like a you know, a little mini Starbucks right there in your tire shop. Games have icebreakers meet and greets. Yeah, I could serve icebreakers come to you get have tinder Tinder day. Okay, Well, I don't know a Roman therapy would be good to be a big one massage. Yeah, alright, let's my's my plan b all right, Josh's tire warehouse and pourium, I think

is what we came up with. Josh's big house of tires or house with big tires. Okay, so ocean currents we're back to it. So um. One of the things that I did not realize, Chuck, when researching this is that ocean currents they're they're old, but they aren't permanent. They haven't always been around. Currents change, you know. Some currents have been at it for thousands and thousands of years. Other currents change months a month, very fickle in some cases.

But there are some really ancient currents, some ancient ocean currents out there that are um very old and have been this way since say, like um, like the Gulf Stream has been around for about five million years, ever since the Isthmus of Panama. Pretty cool stuff, huh. Yeah. I think what I found the most interesting was that ocean currents they have a purpose. You know, it's not just like water moving around willy nilly. You know. If it wasn't for ocean currents, there would be no life

in Antarctica. Right, well, maybe not all of Antarctica, but no ocean marine life. But that's that's an important point. Like, if there's no ocean marine life, then there's no like to say, there's no phytoplankton, there's no phytoplankton, there's no fishies eating the phytoplankton. There's no fishies around to eat the phytoplankton. There's no seals to eat the fishies. If there's no seals, Like, everything finds its support, its basis in the ocean. Life that's all supported by the currents.

That's right. So the fact that has purpose, it's very teleological of you, chuck. So let's not put this off anymonger. Let's talk about different types of currents. You can't talk about tire stores anymore. Okay, we're done with the tire stores. Like I started to get nauseated just talking that much about tire stores. Alright, I don't feel good. Well, uh, let's start with surface currents then, but I'll bring you back to the to the ocean earth science, your home

earth sciences that you love. Uh. Surface currents occur about three to fo um deep and above. Yeah, they're called surface currents, right, and they're driven by the wind. Yeah, they make up for about ten percent of the ocean. And um, if you've ever gone to the beach, you've seen coastal currents. UM surface currents. There's a couple of types. Coastal is one of them. You see them in action, right, like playing in the sand as a little kid or

as an adult. You're you're seeing coastal surface currents at work. So let's step back one more degree. So service currents are created by wave action, that's right. Especially coastal currents are created by wave action, which is created by wind. Waves are created by wind. And you know Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, among other great things, he was the person who pointed out that the wind

doesn't blow, the wind sucks. It's a good point, right, So, and so if coastal currents begin with waves, waves begin with wind. Wind begins with heat because at the equator you have a lot of sunshine all year round and it's very warm, as anyone who's been near the equator can attest. Um, And that heat heats up air, and as the air heats up, it moves away from the equator. It's like, I gotta go cool off. It moves towards the poles north and south, and as it moves toward

the poles, it cools down and turns back around. It's like I need to heat back up at the equator, right. And as a result of this, you have wind. And this wind pushes on the surface of the water, transfer some of its energy in the form of friction to the water surface and creates waves and those waves transfer the energy to shoreline and when they come in at

an angle, that's when you get that coastal current. Right. Yeah, Like with you've again, if you ever been to the beach and you see the tide or the waves coming in at that angle, and you see it moving with the beach, Like if you've ever been out playing on like a raft is a little kid, you look up an hour later and your parents are like half a mile down the beach from where you start, right. It's a bit of a panicky situation, it is. And also you're like, what kind of parents do I have that

they just let me drift half a mile? Yea, you know they're passed out in the sand at that point. Uh So that is called when when uh, a wave breaks on the beach at that angle, it's gonna pull sediment and sand and water down in what's known as a long shore current. That is, uh it's directed off parallel, also perpendicular, but the parallel movement is the long shore uh current. Yeah. It's like when a wave comes into an angle to the shore, it distributes its energy. Part

of it directly on to the shore. Part of it parallels is short and um, that's that long shore current, like you said. And one of the things that it does, you also said, is it takes sand and other stuff and deposits it elsewhere further down and along the way. It creates things like barrier islands and sandbars and all

that stuff. And that's ever shifting, ever moving, um, eroding and depositing of sand and sediment and those little underwater and sometimes above water deposits create other types of current, specifically a riptide current. Yeah. Um, that's the longshore drift and um, like if you've ever seen like the beach

curve back in pretty hard. The water can't make that turn really, so it's just gonna deposit stuff and sort of drop it off there at the end of that point and it'll build up and what's known as a spit, right, and so all of those, all those obstructions, um, all those deposits form obstructions for waves. When they're going back out once they transfer their energy, they're like, oh, I'm pretty far inland. I need to get back out of

the ocean. Yeah, And so it backs up right, and as it does encounters these underwater barriers that it itself have deposited. It's kind of a big ironic moment. And so it can't get back out to see as fast as it wants because it's running into these obstructions. And when there's like a break in the obstruction, like a sandbar or something like that had a break in the sandbar, it provides a natural funnel and that creates a rip tide current. Yeah, like, hey, look at that little narrow channel.

I'm gonna take all this water that would normally just flow out nice and easy. I'm gonna send it through there, and I'm gonna grab your little kid and take it taken with me. Right. If this, it creates basically suction. Just like when you open a drain in a bathtub and it starts to drain, it drains pretty quick. Yeah, it's dangerous, Like that's how you drown when you're swimming in the ocean. You hear about strong rip currents and inclement weather and um, it's no joke. Even really good

swimmers can get caught in a ripping. Yeah, and it's bad news riptide, very bad news. Um. And then there's some other currents that are created that um don't just occur at the at the shore, but they do. They occur in the ocean and at the shore there's this thing called upwelling. This stuff and upwelling can happen in a few different ways, but as far as the coast is concerned. When wind comes in and it basically blows water away from an area, like from the shore, right,

water likes to try to even itself out. So as some water is blown away from the surface, this stuff that's below it, the deeper water will come up and basically replace it, and that's upwelling. Yeah. It's another like what strikes me when you look at wind and all these currents. Everything is circular almost right, so a lot of spinning going on. Yeah, there's a really um distinct

relationship between wind and water. It's inseparable, especially when you're talking about global winds and currents together, right, But both of them are broken down to fluid dynamic X and they do form these circles and cycles and clockwise motions and counterclockwise motions depending on where you are in the world. Yeah. And in the case of upwelling and downwelling, it's not a horizontal spin, but it is a vertical um from top to bottom and then from bottom back up to

the top. Yeah. And you want to talk about um that was which one. Well, both it's the same pattern from top to bottom and bottom to top with upwelling and down welling. Right. And the whole thing about upwelling and downwelling, whether it's at the shore or in the ocean, um, is that the ocean is kind of It's not like if you take a slice of ocean at the top, you take a slice of ocean at the bottom, very

different and you look at them. Yeah, under a microscope or test um for whatever, you know, using some sort of uh, spectroscope, maybe some sort of oscillator, glavin or something like that, or just look at it. Yeah, you're going to find that there's it's like two different types of water. Even though it's from the same part of it's from the same section of ocean, right, And the stuff at the top is going to be very oxygen rich. There's gonna be a lot of life phytoplankton, that kind

of stuff, um, but not too many nutrients. The stuff at the bottom is gonna be lousy with C O two. Yeah, very cold and a lot of nutrients. Right. And when both of these things are needed at different spots, So the upwelling and the downwelling creates this kind of gas

exchange and nutrient exchange throughout the ocean. And the oxygen at the top when it's deposited down lower thanks to down welling, all of that oxygen circulates downward through the ocean and all the fishies that need oxygen in their gills get to breathe it in, right. Yeah. And with upwelling, like I mentioned earlier in Antarctica, where it's super cold and you would not expect marine life to do so well, it is because of the upwelling that brings the nutrients

from the bottom up to the top. And that's iCal and that's called life. And one other really neat thing about upwelling and down welling is um that oxygen that's at the top of the ocean. Were it to just sit there for very long and dissolve, we would have a very big problem because all of that life, once it dies, would decay very quickly up tops. No, it wouldn't, because anaerobic bacteria would begin to thrive and we'd have a over abundance of hydrogen sulfide, which would lead to

ocean acidification, which would mean the end of the world. Basically, So that nutrient swap is very important for everybody on the planet. Yeah, and there's this elegant solution to the oceans that happens every day everywhere in the ocean thanks to upwelling and downwelling. All right, well that's a good start, my friend. Um my eyes are not glazed over, actually good, they're sharp, full of life. Um. We will talk after this break about some more surface currents. All right, Josh,

there's more than one kind of surface current. We covered the I kind of like that first part, but there's also surface ocean currents. And uh, again, the wind is the big contributor to how these babies form um and specifically, I guess we should talk about the Coriolis effect. Yeah, this is a this is a game changer, as people who read self help books on airplanes would call it. Right, yeah, so um. Again, it all starts with heat, and all that heat is found in its thickest part at the equator.

And my brain is broken. So at the equator it's the hottest, right, that's right. And it's also also a spinning fast or the equator than at the poles, right, it is okay, so um, it's the Earth that is yeah, so um. At the equator it's hot, it's spinning faster because of the spin. Because of the heat. The ocean is actually about eight centimeters high higher here than at the rest of the ocean. That's so much higher, So there's a right, it's just enough to make water flow

away from the equator. Plus you've got wind that's whipped up because hot air at the equator starts moving northward and cools down and that creates wind. Right, So if the Earth didn't rotate, you would still have these things. But wind would travel in a straight line away from the equator towards the poles, cool down and turn around and come back in a straight line. That's right. But that's not the case. No, it isn't because the Earth does rotate and it produces the Coriolis effect. Yeah, it's

like a curve. Basically, it uh curves to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisp here. Right, so it makes wind curve and since wind drives surface currents, it makes surface currents curve as well. Right, that's right. So what's really cool is the ocean has its own topography. It's it's definitely not fight. Anybody who's looked at ocean could be like, oh, it's

pretty choppy. But if you if you could step back even further and you had the right kind of topographical glasses on, maybe you would see that there's like valleys and ocean and mountains and maybe not mountains, but little tiny hills and valleys in the ocean. So, like I said, it has its own topography. And this is created by those winds that push on the water. And as they're pushing the water up and the Coriolis effect is turning

at some water starts to kind of mound. So in some parts of the ocean you have water that forms a mountain that's about like three to six ft tall. Yeah, it doesn't sound intuitive, no water mounding up on itself. You think if it as ye, But there is actually water that's mounded up into little hills, okay. And so that means that gravity wants to push this water downward, right, But it doesn't just go back down the hill, because

the Coriolis effect pushes it upward. And the net outcome is that instead the water just says, how about it just go around instead? Yeah, you stay up here on the mound, you stay down here, but I AM going to just go around. And what it does is, since a mound is roughly circular, it creates a current that goes around these things, around these mounds. And there's five major ones in the entire world where you're headed, and they form what are called gyres, that's right, g y R, E, S,

and um. They are the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, and then the Indian Ocean has its very own gyre. There are smaller ones around Antarctica, but those are the five major gyres. We about the Gulf Stream earlier. That is a part of the North Atlantic gyre, and it carries times the water of the entire Mississippi River. The Gulf Stream does. Yeah, the Gulf Stream is the hero of all gyres. It is it moves um. Let me see, I've got to find this one because this

is so amazing. So the the Gulf Stream, at any given point, it moves water at a rate of fifteen superdomes worth per second. So you remember the superdome in Louisiana. Yes, say you've filled it with water, and then you took copied fourteen more times, so you have fifteen superdomes full of water. That's how much water passes through any given point per second. Okay in the Gulf Stream. All right, that's a lot of water. How many big max is at It's trillions of big max billions and billions served.

But the the Gulf Stream itself is actually um. It's technically the western boundary current of the North Atlantic gyre. Yeah, and it's gonna carry warm water. It's it has a big impact in the world. It's gonna carry warm water up north from the Gulf of Mexico. And that's why if you're living on the east coast of Florida, you're gonna have cooler summers and warmer winters. Um. Western Europe is gonna be a lot warmer than other places on its exact same latitude. And this is all because of

the Gulf Stream. You can deposit bodies in it if you're dexter, and those things are gonna yep, see a later body. Yeah, it will probably get carried to England and they'll be like blind, me was this? Uh So that's just the Gulf Stream. There's actually at least four major currents that form the boundary currents of the North Atlantic Gyre, and the North Atlantic Gire is just one. We've also talked about jarres before with the Great Pacific

Garbage Patch. Yeah we covered did we do waves or did we just do We did rogue waves too, but we covered waves and surfing. Okay, ye remember that. Um But these these boundary currents are created again in part by the the winds flowing away from the um equator, the Coriolis effect, turning the waves and the mounds of

water circulating the waves in around them. So you've got these like just clockwise or counterclockwise depending on which hemisphere you are, currents that are just massive that move water around and again they cycle nutrients. Like you said, they affect the weather because they deposit warm water from the south up to all the way up to England apparently. Um so you know, England is on the same latitude as like, um, some glacial parts of Canada. Yeah, that

makes sense. But they're they're winners, are like nothing into that, you know, Thank you ocean. Same thing as a Bermuda is very temperate, has very nice climate, and it's on the same latitude as North Carolina, which is you know, it can get kind of cold there. That's all thanks to the Gulf Stream. Thank you Gulf Stream. And if you want to thank the Gulf Stream, Chuck, you can thank Ben Franklin because he's the one who named it. Yeah.

As the first Postmaster General of the United States, he wanted to figure out why Mayo took so many more weeks longer to get from England to the US than it did from the US to England, because they're they're going against traffic exactly. But he didn't know that, and he found out and he took some measurements and roughly charted the Gulf Stream back in the eighteenth century. He was a smart dude, he really was. That was pretty amazing.

I didn't know he dabbled in oceanography. But again, the Gulf stream amazing, and it's just one boundary current of one major gyre. Yeah, it's kind of a hypnotic. If you look at these motion maps of global motion maps of like trade winds and ocean currents. Yeah, I could watch those videos all day. It's just stuff spinning around and like traveling around, and it's really it's soothing, and especially when they do like heat gradients or topographical gradients,

so it's really colorful too, and it's ever shifting. You can just get a little jewel out of the corner of my mouth when I watched though, it's about as good as watching Phantasia. Um. There's one other thing we should say about those surface currents is they drag on the water below them, right, So the wind is transferring its energy to the surface of the water. Yeah, and it drags a little bit less is the deeper you go. Right. Apparently though, the current that the motion of water, um

usually goes in opposition to the motion of wind. So what you end up having if you could take a column slice from top to bottom of the ocean, you would find that the water ultimately is making a very long down words spiral. Yeah. So, and that's called the ekmun spiral. Yeah, that there's a graphic of that that looks pretty neat as well, pretty neat again, mesmerizing stuff, so chuck um. After this, we will talk about the global conveyor belt. It's my favorite part, I think, all right,

my favorite part of ocean currency. Ocean currents, the deep ocean current a k a. The Global conveyor belt is fascinating to me. Um. If you're talking about this is about if the surface currents are about ten about of the ocean's water, uh is part of the deep ocean current, and we can't see it, um because we're up here on Earth and we are not deep under the water.

It's invisible to us. But um, it circles the globe at a four sixteen times is strong as all of the world's rivers combined, which is again still not as much as the the the Gulf Stream. Still pretty impressive. It's pretty impressive, um, but slow so like water. It moves super water a few centimeters a second, whereas the Gulf stream moves waters at like a couple dred centimeters a second. Yeah, I think the conveyor belt, they said, like one patch will take a thousand years to completely Yeah,

around yeah, the circuit. Yeah, and it takes ten years for water to make a full circuit on the North Atlantic gyre. Yeah, so ten years and then a thousand years. Yeah. Um. So the global conveyor belt, it is uh driven by density, which I think is pretty interesting. Um. Yeah, because up to this point it's all been driven by wind, which is ultimately driven by heat. This is also driven by

heat in a way, but in a completely different way. Yeah, heat and salt um thermohaline circulation thermo being heat and haling being salt. Uh. Warm water holds less salt. So what happens is like let's say you're in the Antarctic and water freezes to form an iceberg or water evaporates. Either way, salt is not going to be a part of that equation. Now the salt is left behind as the water freezes, and you know, icebergs on salt salty their fresh water. Yeah, so the salt is left behind.

It's got to go somewhere. Um, it is going to be very dense at that point. So it is going to be cold and dense and sink to the ocean floor. So remember back on talking about right, and we were talking about um, coastal um coastal currents and upwelling and down welling. Yeah, this plays apart. When water sinks, other water moves in to replace it. And so what starts off here? And this actually I think starts around the

North Pole definitely in the North Atlantic. Um, as that water sinks and moves downward, it creates it starts this current that goes all the way around the world and again takes a thousand years to complete. Yeah, it just kick starts at basically. And um it's called the conveyor belt, I think because it never stops moving and it's super slow. Yeah, I kept getting that remember that, um whatever that Bugs Bunny assembly line song? Like it was always the same,

Like do you remember that? I can't remember it either. Now I have our theme song in my head. I'm trying to think about it. But there's like anytime Bugs Bunny messed around on a conveyor belt or something, they use the same like composition. I'll try to find it. So, uh, once this water hits Antarctica, basically the same thing happens all over again. The cold water is gonna split. Some of it heads to the Indian Ocean, some heads to the Pacific, and this upwelling and downwelling, the cycle just

start all over again, yeah, is it? As it moves closer to like the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, it gets closer to the equator, the water starts to warm up, it loses some of its salinity, it starts to thin out a little bit, and so it rises. And when it does, it takes all those nutrients and all that CEO two up with it. And it's very much like the gas exchange that occurs in the human cardio pulmonary system. Right. Yeah, it's not homeostasis, but it almost feels like that if

you took the whole system overall. Yeah, it's homeostatic for sure, but it's like that by this exchange, this transfer from one part to another, from the deep ocean to the surface. UM. And and this this as it reaches the surface and

it depletes its nutrients, it's carried back around UM. It basically tries to go up hits Um Alaska, Russia, Asia, North Asia, Northeast Asia, and UM turns back around and goes ends up finally back in the North Atlantic, up near the North Pole and gets cold and starts all over right, And by the time it gets there, it's basically nutrient depleted and it sinks and it starts to

recharge again. That's right. And that just like blood in your in your cardio pulmonary system, it gets depleted, it ends up going past the lungs, it transfers out CEO two, it gets in oxygen. This is just the opposite. This is transferring out oxygen and gaining CEO two and nutrients. That's a good way to feel connected to the Earth. When you start looking at things like that, you know,

it's not so different. It's I mean, we're all connected, man. Uh. And again there's a big nutrients swap meat happening as well with the conveyor belt like we're talking about, and basically kind of has the same effect as those surface uh currents do ye as far as exchanging the the oxygen and the CEO two and nutrients and just moving

everything where needs to be. UM. I thought this was pretty cool in this article, UM, the it talks about there's also a density driven a thermohalen current in the Mediterranean because the Mediterranean is apparently saltier than the Atlantic, and as a result, this gradient. Anytime you have a difference in something, whether it's height, temperature, um, salinity, density. Homeostasis is the ultimate goal, so it's going to try to go towards the middle, from higher to lower. And

this is the same thing. So it creates that oceanic current. And apparently in World War two, subs would um run silent by going in and out of the Mediterranean without their engines on, just using that currently, so they would run deep, run silent, run deep exactly. That's frightening. Alright, are we a title currents? You don't have to be frightened. It was years ago. Yeah, we're a title current that they still do that. Now there's no submarines anymore. We

haven't been at war for years. They retired all the submarines. UM. Alright. Tidal currents are generated by the tides. UM. We did talk about UM, like we said, I think in the rogue waves and surfing about tides and waves and UM. The gravitational pull of the moon and the Sun, but more of the Moon because the Moon is closer, is what's gonna cause that bulge on the sides, and it's

gonna drive the water level UM at that bulge. Basically, it's going to decrease, it's going to increase where it's a line with the moon and decrease at the halfway point between those two places. And so and it's always changing because the moon, the position of the Moon and the Sun and the Earth are always changing, but they change in a very predictable manner, so we can predict

when the tides happen. But if you just took a snapshot at any given point of the title effect, right, and if you imagine that the Moon is on one side, the Sun is on one side, and the Earth is on the middle. The world's oceans around the Earth stretch out on the sides and um because of that gravitational pull,

and just imagine that it's always like that. It's always just this elliptical oval shape the world's oceans are and then the Earth, the dry Earth, is spinning within that and so the land masses on the Earth are always coming in and out of that bulge, and so they're

going from higher to lower tide. It's kind of it just makes it easier for me, rather than to think of the oceans moving around the Earth, to think of the Earth spinning within the ocean, and that causes the change and tides that does something for you, does it all the way? Uh? And these are different than the other currents we talked about because they're not it's not a continuous stream and they switch directs. That's the high tide and low tide and um, it doesn't impact like

the ocean current that much. It's shoreline stuff. Yeah, but it's pretty important. I mean, like fish, fishes lay eggs, and uh, low tide will pull those eggs out into the open ocean and those fish will they'll hatch. It also brings food in from the ocean into like marshland and that kind of stuff, or washes up jellyfish and to delight the children on the beach, yes, but don't touch them, you can just look. Uh. And when the tide is rising, um, that flow is directed towards the store.

That's called the flood current. I've heard about that flood and the EBB. And the EBB is when it's directed back out to sea. And that makes it all very predictable. Like you said, we can go to the beach and listen to the tide report. It's also a very relaxing thing to do. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I listen to that. Like the a m like fishing and sharks and title reports. Yeah, it's very relaxing for me. I like it. I remember growing up listening to like grain future reports and hog

reports or stuff like that. Pork futures, um chuck, just a couple more things. So, like, there are plenty of other currents, and there's also plenty of other wind patterns that drive these currents. They do things like create the l Nino, which basically takes weather, thunderstorms and stuff around the equator and moves them in different places that were not used to, which can lead to droughts and floods

depending on where you are. And then also there's a lot of concern among scientists who are who know about this kind of stuff that um changes. Climate change is going to is going to ultimately and negatively affect the global conveyor belt because as um as the earth warms up uh more and more icebergs are gonna melt, creating much less salinity. And since the water will be less

saline um and warmer, it's gonna sink less. And so that global conveyor belt that relies on cold, dense salty water to sink to get it started, is going to slow, and that could be bad because remember it's all that's the global nutrient exchange. Would no, because then the phytoplankton dies. And again when the phytoplankton dies, the fishes die, the seals die, polar bears are upset. Well, the poor seals die. Either way, it is very sad. Yeah, do you got

anything else? No, that's it. That's ocean currents. Uh. If you want to know more about ocean currents, you can type those words into the search bart how stuff works dot com. And since I said search bars, time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this French speaker. Um doesn't like our heavy metal music interludes. There's a few people out there who don't. So here we go. I'm gonna read this just as it came. I like you very much. Sorry for my bad English, but I speak

French so it compensates. I have a little problem. I feel like I need to tell you. Please don't take it the wrong way. I have had problems to sleep for a while now, and I found that listening to podcasts helped me a lot. I put my iPod under my pillow while it plays, where I put only one head. Sound thing in one ear. I love your podcast because it's very interesting, intelligent, and also your voices are nice and you're never yelling. So I do fall asleep every

single time. This is a good thing, I swear. Of course, it takes me three or four times to listen to all of it. Usually I really listened to it in the car. Now my problem, why do you have to put loud heavy metal music for a break? I always wake up in panic when it starts. I do want to continue to listen to you at night, I really do. So you have two choices. Either don't change your music and think of me every time and laugh, or you change it for something, let's say it nicer. Maybe in exchange.

I'm sorry, exchange, I could give you pickup lines in French voir or what? Or what Danielle? I have to say, hats off, Danielle, because I could not. I couldn't write that in French. Oh well you'll speak French, do you? Um? Picquito perfect? Thanks to lat Danielle. We will consider removing the heavy metal music, which we did before and then we brought back because other people are like, bring back

the heavy metal music. So we're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place, Caught between an AMP and a hard place. Yeah, yes uh. If you want to let us know how you feel about our music or anything else, you can tweet to us at s y ESK Podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast to how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at home on the web,

Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com

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