Atlantic Surface Currents Are Getting Stronger

Wind-driven surface currents in the Atlantic Ocean strengthened by 3.8% per decade, plus or minus 1.7 points, from 2003 to 2022, according to drifting-buoy measurements reported Oct. 11, 2026, in Nature Communications. Yuhang Zheng, Yan Du and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of East Anglia measured the trend in near-inertial currents: back-and-forth motions that the wind sets off and that then turn at a rate set by the Earth's rotation.

The paper says that these currents help redistribute material at the sea surface and help mix the ocean, that their long-term variability has remained poorly known, and that the strengthening may matter for how the ocean transports and mixes material and needs to be represented properly in the current generation of climate models.

The trend was not the same everywhere. That figure is a basin-wide average: the South Atlantic and the high-latitude North Atlantic strengthened, while the low-latitude North Atlantic weakened.

Zheng and colleagues attribute the trends mainly to changes in the wind that drives these currents, in particular wind from mesoscale weather systems, meaning mid-size ones, and report only a minor role for changes in the depth of the ocean's mixed surface layer.

The paper is open access. Nature Communications is publishing the accepted version early, with a permanent DOI, and the final version of record will replace it automatically.