Ellie Zolfagharifard
The Daily Mail
September 23, 2013
They are impossible to see, but astronomers are convinced they exist.
Black holes are tears in the fabric of space-time that pull in everything that comes too close to them.
Nothing that gets sucked in can escape, not even light.
Now, scientists believe they have found features of these black holes here on Earth, in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Some of the largest ocean eddies in this region are mathematically equivalent to the mysterious black holes of space, according to researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Miami.
This means that they do the same thing with water, that black holes do with light.
These huge ocean whirlpools are so tightly surrounded by circular water paths that nothing caught up in them escapes.
Their numbers are reportedly on the rise in the Southern Ocean, increasing the northward transport of warm and salty water.
Scientists believe these ocean eddies could moderate the negative impact of melting sea ice in a warming climate.
But up until now they’ve been unable to quantify this impact because the exact boundaries of these swirling water bodies have remained a mystery.
George Haller, professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at ETH Zurich, and Francisco Beron-Vera, research Professor of Oceanography at the University of Miami, believe they have now solved this puzzle.
Using mathematical models, they isolated water-transporting eddies from a sequence of satellite observations.
They did this by detecting their rotating edges, which the scientists found were indicators of the whirlpool within.