VIDEO: Two Oceans Meet, but Don’t Mix Together. What is This Incredible Phenomenon?

A lot of things on the internet look a lot better than they actually are. While, we do, indeed, live in a majestic world, things are often not as extraordinary as we imagine them to be. This is the case of the video that you can see here.

For those that don’t really know that much about science and nature and have studied completely different things, it seems as though two different oceans are meeting, but for some reason, they are not blending into each other. It looks like there are clear lines to separate different oceans as if you would see them on a map.

According to adn.com, a picture from the Gulf of Alaska that has been making the rounds on the Internet for the last few years — though particularly in recent weeks — shows a strange natural phenomenon that occurs when heavy, sediment-laden water from glacial valleys and rivers pours into the open ocean. There in the Gulf, the two types of water run into each other, a light, almost electric blue merging with a darker slate blue.

Informally dubbed “the place where two oceans meet,” the explanation for the photo is a simple one, though there are many misconceptions about it, including that catchy title. In particular on the popular link-sharing website Reddit, where users have on multiple occasions erroneously attributed the photo’s location as “Where the Baltic and the North Sea meet” and the two types of water as being completely incapable of ever mixing, instead perpetually butting against each other like a boundary on a map.

You also may have seen a variation on the photo featuring the same phenomenon, taken by photographer Kent Smith while on a July 2010 cruise in the Gulf of Alaska. That photo too has been circulating the web for some time, though the misconceptions about it seem to be fewer thanks to Smith’s explanation of the photo on his Flickr page. That one has also been making the rounds on Reddit and social media for years, and had racked up more than 860,000 views by early 2013 on that one page alone, Smith said.

That original photo, however, originates from a 2007 research cruise of oceanographers studying the role that iron plays in the Gulf of Alaska, and how that iron reaches certain areas in the northern Pacific.

Ken Bruland, professor of ocean sciences at the University of California-Santa Cruz, was on that cruise. In fact, he was the one who snapped the pic. He said the purpose of the cruise was to examine how huge eddies — slow moving currents — ranging into the hundreds of kilometers in diameter, swirl out from the Alaska coast into the Gulf of Alaska.

Those eddies often carry with them huge quantities of glacial sediment thanks to rivers like Alaska’s 286-mile-long Copper River, prized for its salmon and originating from the Copper Glacier far inland. It empties out east of Prince William Sound, carrying with it all that heavy clay and sediment. And with that sediment comes iron.

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