After it leaves the American coast at Cape Hatteras, the Gulf Stream does not flow in a straight line. It meanders east like a river through the ocean, with warm water from the south on one side and cold Slope Water from the north on the other. This video shows sea surface temperature from satellites from January to June 2022, when the contrast is strongest. The meanders grow and bend into loops. When a loop pinches off, it closes into a ring, a spinning eddy 100 to 300 km across. Warm-core rings break off to the north, into the cold water off New England and Nova Scotia. Cold-core rings break off to the south, into the warm Sargasso Sea. A ring can live for months and carries its own water, plankton and fish far from where they came from, sometimes all the way back to the shelf.
Source: Data: NASA JPL Multi-scale Ultra-high Resolution (MUR) SST v4.1, via NOAA CoastWatch ERDDAP, shown at 0.06° every 3 days. Coastline: GLOBE land mask. Visualisation by The Moving Sea
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