Making sense of the Moskstraumen's speedy currents

In the north of Norway lies the Lofoten archipelago, home to one of the world’s strongest open-ocean tidal currents. The Lofoten Maelstrom, known locally as Moskstraumen, is generated by large differences in tidal amplitude between the Vestfjord and the Norwegian Sea.

The fast-flowing currents, powerful waves, eddies and whirlpools have inspired short stories and books, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s A Descent into the Maelström and Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

“This is a mythological place,” Dr Øyvind Saetra, deputy head of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute’s division for Ocean and Ice, explains.

Moskstraumen is a perilous and challenging place to research.

“The traditional way of measuring ocean currents is by having a mooring, with a line going from the bottom to the top of the ocean with different instruments attached. When you have 3 m per second current through the whole water column, the mooring will be destroyed,” says Saetra…

Read the full story at Nortek to discover how Dr Saetra peeked into the Moskstraumen, and what he learned.