Perpetual Ocean

Wired:

A team of data visualisers at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre has put together an incredible animation of sea surface currents around the world.
The visualisation was put together using data from Nasa's ECCO2 model. The model maps ocean and sea ice data across the world, at impressive resolutions that can resolve ocean eddies and narrow-current systems that don't show up in coarser models. These currents tend to be the main drivers of heat, salinity and carbon transport in the oceans.
The patterns under the ocean represent the bathymetry of the depths below the surface, exaggerated 40x. The topography of the land has been exaggerated 20x. The model simulates flow at all depths, though the visualisation only shows surface flows.

That is really, really cool.  I'd love to see how much computing power is required for that simulation.