Name: Where Two Oceans Meet, Debunked
Uploaded: 2020-04-01T01:07:58.000Z
Duration: 2 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Cape Reinga, at the very northern tip of New Zealand's North Island,

is one of the few places in the world where you can watch two oceans collide.

So say the guidebooks, anyway. The truth is a little more complicated.

First of all, you can find photos online like this.

I took that from a kayak in Svalbard, up in the Arctic.

Two very different coloured waters separated by a bit of foam.

People online claim that photos like it show one of the few places in the world

where two oceans meet but don't mix, but no.

That's just where a river is washing fresh water filled with sediment out into the sea.

The truth of where two oceans meet is just not that dramatic.

Here, at least, you can see the waves from the Tasman Sea coming in from the west

and clashing with the Pacific Ocean waves from the east.

Ocean currents and waves have many causes:

the weather, water temperature, water salinity -- how much salt's in there.

Now, with all the complicated geography and wind here at the very tip of the country:

of course it's chaotic down there, it's turbulent,

of course you have different sets of waves meeting, but those are local effects.

the water here will become part of the massive system that's defined by

And those ocean currents are measured in sverdrup.

One sverdrup is a million cubic metres of water, moving at a metre per second,

and the largest currents measure more than a hundred sverdrup.

Those are amounts that make no sense on any human scale.

While there are often currents here that might contribute to that particular weird wave pattern...

this is just one very, very small bit of the ocean with waves that look messy on a human scale

this isn't even where the Tasman Sea ends and the Pacific begins.

The official limits of oceans and seas are defined

by the International Hydrographic Organisation,

and those standards are arbitrary lines designed to make sure that everyone can agree on what's where,

so that weather warnings and marine charts describe the same areas no matter who's producing them.

Those lines are nothing to do with the position of any ocean currents.

the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific at North Cape,

a closed nature reserve about two kilometres that way.

This is just a windy bit of rock with a lighthouse and a road.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't come here, though.

it's part of the local mythology, and it's worth the trip.

But when they say it's where two oceans collide…