My latest -- a deep dive into the Gulf Stream, a story about something that could affect weather from Charleston to London

Off South Carolina, the ocean suddenly changes color, from green to deep blue. You’re in the Gulf Stream now, in warm and salty water from the tropics, with swordfish, tuna and squid, in a current so strong that it lowers our sea level.

Benjamin Franklin would learn about this current’s force. He was a Colonial postmaster before the American Revolution, and he’d noticed British mail ships were slow, much slower than other merchant ships. Why?

He mentioned this to his cousin, Timothy Folger, a ship captain who’d hunted whales off New England. Ah, yes, that current off the East Coast, Folger told Franklin. Any fishermen worth their nets cut in and out to make better time — the whalers had even warned the mail ships to steer clear. But the Brits “were too wise to be counseled by American fishermen.”

A map might help, and so they made a chart of this “Gulf Stream” from Florida toward Europe. It was one of the first maps to document its tremendous reach.

Map or no map, the British mail ships still bucked the current, and letters still arrived more slowly than they should have. But there it was now, on paper, a massive river in the sea, a swift flow with mysteries scientists have only begun to solve.

The Gulf Stream is one of the mightiest currents on Earth. It moves at a rate of 30 billion gallons per second, more than all of the world’s freshwater rivers combined. On its way, it hauls vast amounts of heat; a hurricane that twists into it gets a blast of fuel. It’s a highway for migrating fish and a destination for deep-sea fishermen. It courses through an area that oil companies want to probe; an oil spill in the Gulf Stream would spread far and wide.

Though just 50 miles from Charleston, the Gulf Stream has so much momentum it tilts the sea level down like a seesaw. If you could walk on water, a trek from the Gulf Stream to Folly Beach would go downhill 3 to 5 feet. Put another way, without the Gulf Stream whisking all that water past us, our tides would be at least 3 feet higher.

In 2009, the Atlantic’s system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, slowed by 30 percent in a matter of weeks. Sea levels in New England also rose 5 inches above normal. Scientists were stunned. The currents regained their strength a year later, but scientists wondered: Was this a blip? Has global warming somehow gummed up the currents? If so, what’s next?

The race to understand the Gulf Stream and its associated currents is a deep dive into history, technology and recent aha moments in science.

It involves messages in bottles, abandoned telephone cables and undersea waterfalls.
The story has largely been missed amid the ebb and flow of other climate issues.


But the impact of this great current is undeniable. Changes in its velocity could rearrange marine life throughout the hemisphere. If it’s slowing for the long term — as a growing chorus of scientists fear — sea levels on the East Coast would rise more quickly, further threatening billions of dollars in shoreside property. It would alter weather patterns, affecting everything from hurricanes here to monsoons in India.

Beyond these stakes, this race also is about something else: the human drive to explore, that irresistible itch to look beyond what we know.

It could begin with Franklin’s epiphany about the slow mail.

But why not start with Ringo?

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