This animation looks beneath the ocean surface to reveal the oceanic processes that led to the 1997/98 El Niño - an event that caused billions of dollars of damage worldwide and was followed by consecutive strong La Niña events.

It is so detailed that it took 30,000 computer hours crunching ocean model data on Australia’s most powerful supercomputer, Raijin, before it could be extracted by the NCI visualisation team to produce the animation.

Read more about the work that went into this visualisation here.

Aspect ratio
16:9