THE Mozambique current, an Indian Ocean current believed to be the world's largest and feared for its strong tide along the southeastern seaboard of the African continent, does not exist after all.
The chief scientist aboard a Dutch research vessel, the RV Pelagia, Dr Herman Ridderinkhof, last week told The EastAfrican in Dar es Salaam, where the vessel had docked for a few days, that the exciting discovery changes the existing knowledge on all ocean atlases and nautical charts, which show the existence of a strong current between Mozambique and Madagascar island.
"The continuous Mozambique current does not exist. Instead, there are circulating 'Mozambique eddies' which determine the ocean currents in this area," the scientist said.
The discovery was made in a multiple marine study conducted along the path of the supposedly dangerous current.
Dr Ridderinkhof, who is from the Netherlands Institute of Sea Research (NIOZ), said it would be necessary to redo the atlases to show that a continuous Mozambique current does not exist.
Instead, the 300-km diameter eddies circulating off Mozambique determine the ocean currents in the area.
"Ocean currents have a huge impact on the global climate; therefore, ocean atlases and nautical charts have to be redrawn," he stressed.
The research, which studied ocean currents and properties of the ocean around Africa, was carried out within the framework of the Dutch contribution to the international research programme CLImate VARiability (CLIVAR).
Dr Ridderinkhof said that Mozambique eddies "poured into" the Agulhas Current is where the Mozambique eddies pour in. The current is one of the largest ocean currents in the world and flows along the eastern coast of the African continent.
It transports enormous amounts of heat southward from the Equator to the South Pole and the ocean around Antarctica. Part of this flow enters the South Atlantic in the form of large eddies.
The RV Pelagia conducted 10 different research programmes during its research cruise, which took it to Reunion, Madagascar, Cape Town in South Africa and the Suez Canal.
This latest trip was a follow-up to a previous one made in March 2000.
A Dutch embassy press officer in Dar, Mr Jack Twiss, said that RV Pelagia was part of a larger oceanographic programme undertaken together with the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
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RV Pelagia arrived in Dar on April 16 on its way back to the Netherlands via the Suez Canal after a three-and-a-half-month stay in the region. It left Texel port in the Netherlands on January 3 for the "Around Africa 2001" expedition. It is expected to return to Texel on June 5. It left Dar on April 18.
The 1,615-tonne RV Pelagia was built in 1991 by Verolme Shipyard Heusden at Heusden in the Netherlands. It was designed to make mulitidisciplinary research cruises in coastal seas and over continental shelves all around the world, but concentrating on the North Sea.
The ship is part of the three-vessel fleet owned by NIOZ. The other two research vessels are the RV Navicula and RV Griend, which operate in the shallow Wadden Sea.
The research team has undertaken hydrographic observations of water salinity, oxygen and nutrient-level determination.
The results will be used for global climate modelling and for implementation in numerical models of the currents around Africa.
