Where two oceans meet, debunked

Cape Reinga, at the northern tip of New Zealand's North Island, is one of the few places in the world

where

you can see two

oceans

collide. That's what the guides say, anyway. The truth is a little more complicated. First of all, you can find photos like this online. I took it out of a kayak in Svalbard, in the Arctic. Two waters of very different colors separated by a little foam. People online claim that photos like this show one of the few places in the world

where

two

oceans

meet

but don't mix, but no. That is precisely where a river drags fresh water full of sediments to the sea.

The truth about where two oceans

meet

is not so dramatic. Here, at least, you can see the waves of the Tasman Sea coming in from the west and colliding with the waves of the Pacific Ocean from the east. Good? No. Ocean currents and waves have many causes: weather, water temperature, water salinity (how much salt is there). And they are three-dimensional. Now, with all the complicated geography and wind here at the very edge of the country: of course it's chaotic down there, it's turbulent, of course there are different sets of waves that meet, but those are local effects.

As soon as you move away from land, the water here will become part of the massive system defined by global climate and ocean currents. And those ocean currents are measured in sverdrup. A sverdrup is one million cubic meters of water moving at one meter per second, with the largest streams measuring over one hundred sverdrup. These are quantities that make no sense on any human scale. While there are often currents here that could contribute to that particular strange wave pattern... this is just a very, very small part of the ocean with waves that look messy on a human scale due to the nearby land.

And despite what the guidebooks say, this isn't even where the Tasman Sea ends and the Pacific begins. Not according to the maps. The official boundaries of the oceans and seas are defined by the International Hydrographic Organization, and those standards are arbitrary lines designed to ensure that everyone can agree on what is where, so that weather warnings and marine charts describe them. areas regardless of who produces them. These lines have nothing to do with the position of ocean currents. And by those standards, the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific at the North Cape, a closed nature reserve about two kilometers in that direction.

This is just a windy piece of rock with a lighthouse and a road. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't come here. Cape Reinga is beautiful, part of local mythology and worth the trip. But when they say it's where two oceans collide... that's not entirely true.