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What's to see in the Ocean?

The ocean plays an essential role in the world's climate system, absorbing about half the heat from the sun. The heat escapes to warm the atmosphere, mainly through evaporation either locally or months or years later having been transported by ocean currents thousands of kilometres.

The upper three metres of the ocean can hold more heat than the entire atmosphere, and sea surface and subsurface temperatures are now used by meteorologists when they make climate forecasts.

The sun's energy also drives large-scale wind systems and cells in the atmosphere. In turn, the winds, along with sinking cold water in the polar and subpolar oceans, drive the ocean. The resulting ocean currents redistribute the energy absorbed from the sun throughout the world's oceans, carrying it away from the region of greatest heat in the tropics towards the colder polar regions.

Australia's climate variability is strongly influenced by the Pacific Ocean, the El Niņo/Southern Oscillation phenomenon and sea surface temperature patterns in the Indian and Southern Oceans. Long term, the Southern Ocean is critical in evaluating the timing and regional impacts of climate change.

Winds move across the earth's surface towards the west near the equator (trade winds) and towards the east in the temperate mid-latitudes (Westerlies and Roaring Forties). Their effects create large circulation patterns in each of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Ocean basins, moving clockwise north of the equator and anticlockwise south of the equator.

The gyres (or circular motions) move water from equatorial to polar regions along the eastern coasts of continents as intense warm currents (like the East Australia Current). In regions near the equa