What is the East Wind Drift?

Asked by: George Hartley

The Antarctic Coastal Current, also known as the East Wind Drift Current, is the southernmost current in the world. This current is the counter-current of the largest ocean current in the world, Antarctic Circumpolar Current. On the average, it flows westward and parallel to the Antarctic coastline.

What is West Wind Drift?

Antarctic Circumpolar Current, also called ACC or West Wind Drift, wind-driven surface oceanic current encircling Antarctica and flowing from west to east. Affected by adjacent landmasses, submarine topography, and prevailing winds, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is irregular in width and course.

How fast is the West Wind Drift?

It encircles the earth, crossing the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans; the cold Bengal, West Australian, and Peru currents branch off from it in the oceans. Its speed is 1-2 km per hr.

Is the West Wind Drift warm or cold?

cold

West wind drift is a cold southern hemisphere ocean current that runs west to east, generally between 40 and 60 degrees south latitude.

Where is the West Wind Drift current located?

Antarctica

Antarctic Circumpolar Current(West Wind Drift) The largest and most important ocean current in the southern hemisphere. It flows in an eastward direction around Antarctica, and occupies a wide tract of water in the South Pacific, South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.

What drives the North Atlantic Current?

Driven by the global thermohaline circulation, the North Atlantic Current is part of the wind-driven Gulf Stream, which goes further east and north from the North American coast across the Atlantic and into the Arctic Ocean.

Where is the strongest current in the ocean?

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the planet’s most powerful and arguably most important current. It is the only current to flow clear around the globe without being diverted by any landmass.

What is the Labrador Current between?

The Labrador Current is a cold current in the North Atlantic Ocean which flows from the Arctic Ocean south along the coast of Labrador and passes around Newfoundland, continuing south along the east coast of Canada near Nova Scotia.

Is there a Gulf Stream in the Pacific?

The Kuroshio Current is the Pacific analogue of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean, transporting warm, tropical water northward toward the polar region.

What ocean currents affect Antarctica?

The ACC, as it encircles the Antarctic continent, flows eastward through the southern portions of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Edmond Halley, the British astronomer, discovered the ACC while surveying the region during the 1699-1700 HMS Paramore expedition.

What is the longest current in the world?

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the largest current in the world. ‘It’s been estimated that this current is 110–150 times larger than all the water flowing in all the rivers of the world,’ says Dr Mike Williams.

What is the strongest ocean current in the Atlantic Ocean?

The ACC carries water around the globe, pushing more water than any other ocean current.

What is the fastest ocean current in the world?

The Gulf Stream

The Gulf Stream is the fastest ocean current in the world with peak velocities near 2m/s.

What is the largest gulf in the world called?

The Gulf of Mexico is the largest gulf in the world. Home to barrier islands, shipwrecks, historical forts, white sand beaches, wilderness, and thousands of species of plants and wildlife, the Gulf of Mexico is a true treasure. Its 600,000 square miles of sea make it the ninth-largest body of water in the world.

What ocean was named in the year 2000?

The Southern Ocean is the ‘newest’ named ocean. It is recognized by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names as the body of water extending from the coast of Antarctica to the line of latitude at 60 degrees South. The boundaries of this ocean were proposed to the International Hydrographic Organization in 2000.

What is the fastest thing in the world?

Light

Light is fast. In fact, it is the fastest thing that exists, and a law of the universe is that nothing can move faster than light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second) and can go from the Earth to the Moon in just over a second.

Is light faster than darkness?

Darkness travels at the speed of light. More accurately, darkness does not exist by itself as a unique physical entity, but is simply the absence of light. Any time you block out most of the light – for instance, by cupping your hands together – you get darkness.

Is a black hole faster than light?

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have seen that the famous giant black hole in Messier 87 is propelling particles at speeds greater than 99% of the speed of light.

Is anything faster than light?

Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity famously dictates that no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, which is 299,792 km/s. This speed limit makes it unlikely that humans will ever be able to send spacecraft to explore beyond our local area of the Milky Way.

Do wormholes exist?

Wormholes are shortcuts in spacetime, popular with science fiction authors and movie directors. They’ve never been seen, but according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, they might exist.

Is warp speed possible?

“None of the physically conceivable warp drives can accelerate to speeds faster than light,” Bobrick says. That is because you would require matter capable of being ejected at speeds faster than light—but no known particles can travel that fast.

Is it possible to travel back in time?

Time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit traveling faster than the speed of light, such as cosmic strings, traversable wormholes, and Alcubierre drives.

Does the past exist?

In short, space-time would contain the entire history of reality, with each past, present or future event occupying a clearly determined place in it, from the very beginning and for ever. The past would therefore still exist, just as the future already exists, but somewhere other than where we are now present.

Is time an illusion?

According to theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, time is an illusion: our naive perception of its flow doesn’t correspond to physical reality. Indeed, as Rovelli argues in The Order of Time, much more is illusory, including Isaac Newton’s picture of a universally ticking clock.

Who is the first time traveler?

Did you know that Russian Cosmonaut Сергей Авдеев (“Sergei Avdeyev”) is considered Earth’s first significant time traveler? During his active years as a cosmonaut (1992-1999), he set a record for cumulative time in space. Across 3 visits to the Mir station, he spent an astonishing 747 days in low Earth orbit!

Is time travel possible in 2022?

And, as physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out in his book “Black Holes and Baby Universes” (opens in new tab) (Bantam, 1994), “The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.”

Can I go back in time and change the past?

His work, published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity last week, suggests that according to the rules of theoretical physics, anything you tried to change in the past would be corrected by subsequent events. Put simply: It’s theoretically possible to go back in time, but you couldn’t change history.