Where can i find what a "gyre" is?

You can find out right here. A gyre is a circular pattern of surface circulation that exists in the oceans. They usually consist of four currents. For example the North Atlantic gyre consists of the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic, Canary, and North Equatorial currents. In the oceans there are five major gyres North and South Atlantic and Pacific gyres and the Indian Ocean gyre. Those in the Northern hemisphere rotate in a clockwise direction and those in the southern hemisphere rotate in a generally counterclockwise direction. There are also a number of smaller gyres, but these don't necessarily follow the direction patterns of the larger gyres.

A gyre is any manner of swirling vortex. It is often used to describe wind or ocean currents, for example the North Pacific Gyre.

The word was also used by William Butler Yeats for an occult historical concept presented in his book A Vision (a book whose ideas Yeats claimed to receive from spirits of the dead). The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the phases of an individual's psychological development). Yeats uses the words in many of his poems, including "The Second Coming (poem)."

Lewis Carroll used the word as a verb in the opening stanza of his poem "Jabberwocky", defining it as "to go round and round like a gyroscope."

In bodies of water, organisms use gyres for movement from areas of depleted nutrients to areas of higher nutrients. Gyres are caused by Coriolis force.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyre