Stunningly Dumb Viral Video Doesn't Show Where the Pacific Ocean and North Sea 'Meet'

Have you been seeing videos lately claiming to show a point where the Pacific Ocean meets the North Sea, suggesting the two don’t mix? It’s a nonsense claim for so many reasons, but that hasn’t stopped one video from racking up nearly 20 million views by our count.

“Nobody can explain why oceans meet and never mix,” one X user with a tweet featuring the viral video wrote on Tuesday.

“The beauty of the oceans,” another X user wrote in a tweet that’s been seen over 12 million times.

Both of the accounts, it should be noted, have blue checkmarks which can be purchased for $8 per month. Before Elon Musk bought the platform, the verification system was intended to combat impersonators, but it now gives anyone who can rub two brain cells together the ability to get boosted by the X algorithm.

Why is this video so dumb? If you pull up a map of the North Sea, you can observe for yourself that it’s surrounded by England, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The closest major ocean is the Atlantic and it’s nowhere near the Pacific. Simply put, the North Sea and the Pacific Ocean never meet. But that’s just one reason it’s so painful to see this video getting traction on a major social media site.

For whatever reason, the past few years have produced countless videos of people claiming to show where oceans meet but don’t mix. Typically, these viral videos show places where saltwater and freshwater collide, making it look like there’s a line separating the two. These videos can be particularly deceiving when a wide river meets the ocean. Reasonable people can think they’re viewing something shot on the open ocean, not realizing the very simple explanation for what they’re seeing.

Ask any oceanographer, as USA Today did in a debunker from 2022, and they’ll tell you that the oceans do “mix,” despite frequent posts on social media that there’s some kind of reason for them not mixing. One common claim on platforms like X, TikTok, and YouTube is that different iron and clay content prevent the oceans from mixing, an idea that simply isn’t true.

But the idea that you can draw a line precisely showing where major oceans begin and end is tremendously popular. And that idea seems particularly common among people who want to insist science doesn’t understand why “oceans don’t mix.”

“This is the Gulf of Alaska where 2 oceans meet but do not mix. Tell me there is No God and I’ll ask you ‘Who commanded the mighty waves and told them they could go no further than this’! What an absolutely AMAZING God.....” one viral post from Facebook claimed.

Well, actually we do understand. Because the oceans do mix. Even if incredibly dense people on social media tell you otherwise.