James Riordon (NASA website author) and Gwen Berry
I first read about ECCO2 and the Perpetual Ocean 2 video at the Good News Network website. It told about a mesmerizing new visualization of ocean currents that has been compared to Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, Starry Night. The video of ocean currents is so fascinating and beautiful I wanted to share it. You can watch the video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5-s6O8qyvE. Be sure and set it to full screen. Turn off the sound if you just want to focus on the visual effects.
The science behind this visualization of ocean currents is extraordinary. Historically, the ocean has been difficult to model. Scientists struggled in years past to simulate ocean currents or accurately predict fluctuations in temperature, salinity, and other properties. As a result, models of ocean dynamics rapidly diverged from reality, which meant they could only provide useful information for brief periods.
In 1999, a project called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) changed all that. It was followed in 2005 by Phase 2 (ECCO2). By applying the laws of physics to data from multiple satellites and thousands of floating sensors, NASA scientists and their collaborators built ECCO to be a realistic, detailed, and continuous ocean model that spans decades. The project provides models that are the best possible reconstruction of the past 30 years of the global ocean. It allows us to understand the ocean’s physical processes at scales that are not normally observable.
The ECCO project includes hundreds of millions of real-world measurements of temperature, salinity, sea ice concentration, pressure, water height, and flow in the world’s oceans, including observations from spacecraft, buoys, and other onsite measurements to keep the model accurate. Researchers rely on the model output to study ocean dynamics and to keep tabs on conditions that are crucial for ecosystems and weather patterns.
The modeling effort is supported by NASA’s Earth science programs and by the international ECCO consortium, which includes researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and eight research institutions and universities.
In 2011, NASA used the ECCO2 model to create an amazing video, Perpetual Ocean. It quickly went viral, with many comparing the swirls of the currents to Vincent van Gogh’s iconic painting, Starry Night, from 1889. A new version of the video was just released in February 2025. ‘Perpetual Ocean 2’ is a sequel to the popular first version—and the new visualization now shows currents not just at the water’s surface.
“In 2011, we used ECCO2 to create a visualization called Perpetual Ocean. Perpetual Ocean continues to be extremely popular, but it only shows ocean currents on the surface,” said a statement from NASA Goddard. “In this new visualization, we use the ocean’s 3D velocity field to visualize some of the strongest ocean currents. We release virtual particles in the ocean and allow them to move with the ocean’s three dimensional velocity field. The particle trails help identify the strongest currents in the world that are squeezed in narrow belts on the western side of each ocean basin.”