Here is a media report about 'Black Holes' in Ocean. The paper can be seen here.( The full paper can be seen by clicking the 'PDF' button.)
Bloody Journos! All these guys have done is some new mathematical modelling of previously well-known things called Agulhas Rings (arising from the Agulhas Current). Their finding is that the modelling has similar mathematical properties to the "photon sphere" at the edge of an astronomical black hole. Of course these eddies have no capacity to suck in things forever (being made of incompressible fluid they couldn't possibly) and indeed they do not last more than a year before dissipating. And that's it.
But it sounds so ominous, exuberant, and eternal...these Agulhas Rings. However calling them "black holes" is definitely a mistake, the term is for space phenomena.
A few months ago, some guy gave a talk about Hawking radiation. He was trying to study it by mapping the equations for curved space onto flowing water and looking at the flow patterns out of a bottlenecked trough. This article reminds me a bit of that talk... At any rate, though, maelstroms are cool! And I did not know until reading this article that they could perform long-distance, lossless transport. Thanks for a fun read!
The Agulhas rings are amazing in themselves imv and the location is one of the sights identified by the great Ivan Sanderson as "Vile Vortices". Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! But I agree, the Huff Post article was pretty naff.
