These eddies are so tightly shielded by circular water paths that nothing caught up in them escapes.
George Haller, Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at ETH Zurich, and Francisco Beron-Vera, Research Professor of Oceanography at the University of Miami, have developed a new mathematical technique to find water-transporting eddies with coherent boundaries.
The challenge in finding such eddies is to pinpoint coherent water islands in a turbulent ocean. The rotating and drifting fluid motion appears chaotic to the observer both inside and outside an eddy.
Black holes are objects in space with a mass so great that they attract everything that comes within a certain distance of them. Nothing that comes too close can escape, not even light.
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But at a critical distance, a light beam no longer spirals into the black hole. Rather, it dramatically bends and comes back to its original position, forming a circular orbit.
It is these barriers that help to identify coherent ocean eddies in the vast amount of observational data available. The very fact that such coherent water orbits exist amidst complex ocean currents is surprising, researchers said.
Because black-hole-type ocean eddies are stable, they function in the same way as a transportation vehicle - not only for micro-organisms such as plankton or foreign bodies like plastic waste or oil, but also for water with a heat and salt content that can differ from the surrounding water.
The researchers identified seven Agulhas Rings of the black-hole type, which transported the same body of water without leaking for almost a year.
Haller points out that similar coherent vortices exist in other complex flows outside of the ocean. In this sense, many whirlwinds are likely to be similar to black holes as well.
The study was published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.