NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio -- the same team that recently brought us an animation of the moon as it will appear from Earth for each hour of 2012 -- has also released a stunning video called "Perpetual Ocean," a time lapse of the world's ocean currents as calculated by the ECCO2 computational model.

The editors at the Visualization Studio write:

ECCO2 attempts to model the oceans and sea ice to increasingly accurate resolutions that begin to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow-current systems which transport heat and carbon in the oceans.The ECCO2 model simulates ocean flows at all depths, but only surface flows are used in this visualization.

Perpetual Ocean was submitted at the last minute to the SIGGRAPH 2011 conference and didn't make the cut, but it's now online for all of us to be mesmerized by.

[flowingdata]