A Florida current Franklin mapped still warms Northwest Europe
The Gulf Stream is a swift, warm Atlantic current born in the Gulf of Mexico, squeezing between Florida and Cuba and then running north along the U.S. East Coast before turning east near 36°N off North Carolina into the North Atlantic Current toward Northwest Europe. Western intensification keeps it narrow and fast.
Spanish sailors met it first. On 22 April 1513, Juan Ponce de León’s ships found themselves pushed backward despite a strong wind, and his pilot Antón de Alaminos usually gets credit for the discovery; Spanish fleets then rode it home from the Caribbean. In 1768 Benjamin Franklin puzzled over why British mail ships took weeks longer to reach New York than merchant ships reaching Rhode Island. His cousin Timothy Folger, a Nantucket whaler, explained that traders crossed the current, spotting it by whales, warmth and colour, while the mail captains fought it head-on. Their chart was printed in London in 1769 and largely ignored.
The physics comes from wind. Trade winds and westerlies twist the ocean surface, and to balance the slow southward drift that results, water must rush north in a narrow band hugging the western edge of the basin. Henry Stommel observed in 1958 that barely any Gulf of Mexico water actually travels in it. About 100 kilometres wide and up to 1,200 metres deep, it moves 30 million cubic metres a second through the Florida Straits, swelling to 150 south of Newfoundland, with surface speeds near 2.5 metres per second.
Around 40°N 30°W it divides: one branch heads for northern Europe, while the Canary Current loops back along West Africa. Norway’s coast stays largely ice-free, which lets Tromsø thrive north of the Arctic Circle, and Ireland and western Britain run a few degrees milder than their eastern sides. Off Florida the water stays at least 24 °C through winter, and tropical fish ride north as far as Nantucket.
That heat also feeds storms, since hurricanes need water above 26.5 °C; Sandy in 2012 gathered strength following it. Two studies in Nature in April 2018 judged it the weakest in at least 1,600 years. The IPCC’s sixth assessment expects slowing but no shutdown, bringing higher seas along North America and fiercer North Atlantic storms.
Source: Gulf Stream
