Ship tracks in the Atlantic Ocean

 Ship tracks in the Atlantic Ocean Today’s Video of the Day comes from the European Space Agency (ESA) and features a look at the Atlantic Ocean.

These tracks were spotted off the coast of Spain and Portugal by the Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite.

The condensation trails, also known as contrails, are usually created by airplanes, but can also be emitted by shipping vessels. Ship tracks in the Atlantic Ocean As show above shows that with this vessel tracker you can monitor ship positions.  According to Google themselves,  tracks are the leftover traces of anoceanic depth measuring process called “echosounding”. 

 Ship tracks can be seen as lines in these clouds over the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast of the United States. Ship tracks are clouds that form around the exhaust released by ships into the still ocean air. Water molecules collect around the tiny particles (aerosols) from exhaust to form a cloud seed. A maze of long white clouds is interwoven into the uneven field of white that covers the Atlantic Ocean off the east coast of the United States. NASA captured a similar image over the eastern Pacific Ocean in early October 2009: A bank of clouds off North America’s west coast shows a series of white ship tracks captured on October 5, 2009.

By Rory Arnold, Earth.com Staff Writer

Video Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)