The Vœrtex
In the dark, a planet spins, and so too do its oceans. Mapping the temperature of our world’s currents reveals an intricately balanced circulation driving global weather systems.
Cooling in the North Atlantic, the oceans become denser as salt is abandoned by freezing water. This denser icy brine sinks deeper, replaced with warmer surface water flowing from neighbouring areas to then cool and sink itself. It is a finely tuned push and pull. We and our factory-distorted minds call it a “global conveyor belt”.
As the Earth’s climate warms, less water becomes ice, and the process of increasing density falters. The circulation seizes. The water congeals. Currents pausing, resting, stagnating.
From Latin gelare (“to freeze, congeal, stiffen”) descends English jelly (Douglas 2017).
There’s a perception that jellyfish are subject to the whims of ocean currents, washed by the tide into estuaries and river mouths, up against coasts, into balled swarms - but they have been proven to be able to recognise and swim against ocean currents (Fossette et al. 2015).
With fewer predators, as climate change and the fishing industry disrupt ecosystems, jellyfish flourish and bloom (Kirby 2009).
This research also reveals the ways jellyfish and other zooplankton may be responsible for the mixing of different water densities and temperatures. Their daily vertical migrations from the safety of the seafloor to the resource-rich surface (among other zooplankton) is credited with being such an enormous movement of biomass that it potentially impacts global ocean currents through biogenic water mixing. (Katija)
These creatures are credited with being the most energetically efficient swimmers ever discovered. Research into the fluid dynamics behind their motion has revealed that, through the creation of two vortex rings that spin in opposite directions by the pulsing of their bell, they can create a “wall”. (Gemmell) This is a point where the vortices of equal force and opposite rotation meet, and the flow stagnates, freezes, congeals, acting as a solid fixed point from which jellyfish can propel themselves.