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Peter Niiler of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and colleagues collected data from more than 10,000 ocean buoys they tracked by satellite between 1992 and 2003. As expected, the buoys' movements were influenced mainly by known global currents.

But when the team analyzed the data, it found something else was influencing the buoys -- alternating strips of water running eastward or westward, similar to parallel moving sidewalks. Niiler recalls his reaction: "My God, we've never seen these before."

To confirm the currents were real, the team set out to measure them directly in two regions of the eastern Pacific.

The researchers told New Science magazine they found the approximately 93-mile-wide adjacent currents cover nearly every ocean on Earth and reach to the ocean floor.

The study that included Nikolai Maximenko of the University of Hawaii and Hideharu Sasaki of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology is detailed in the April 24 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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