The ocean has thousands of slow-moving mega-whirlpools moving along watery superhighways.

This discovery up-ends the models of ocean transport and its influence on climate.  There's a video.
The vortices, some sixty miles across and half a mile deep, move along pathways in the ocean about 3 miles per day.  They dip about 20 inches towards the middle and today's satellites can detect this.  They move about thirty times as much water as all the rivers of the world contribute daily to the oceans and are on a scale approaching the Gulf Stream.  The movement of heat, salt, carbon and pollution has to be re-thought.

The video is coded red for clockwise and blue for counter-clockwise.  Note there is motion in both directions within the Gulf Stream and east-to-west in many places.

The information is gleaned from Wired.com's larger article.