Abstract
A brief history of the Antilles-Guiana Current discovery during cruise 5 of the scientific research vessel (R/V) “Akademik Kurchatov” in 1969 in the Atlantic Ocean is presented. This expedition of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences was targeted for experimental study of the Western Boundary Current System in the tropical Atlantic. The previous studies in this region revealed signs of the Southern flow within the system, which overall meridional velocity component was of the Northern direction. However, the traces of Southern currents in all such cases were usually interpreted as a manifestation of a large-scale eddy activity in the velocity field of the main North-Western water transport. In the expedition of 1969, for the first time in the Russian oceanography a non-trivial method for the direct measurements of a current velocity was applied. It is based on the results of an immediate preliminary hydrographic survey of the area, which proposed by Y.A. Ivanov. This method has made possible to determine in details the actual system of the Western boundary flows, in which the previously unknown to science the Antilles-Guiana Current was discovered. The other Russian expeditions, which have been carried out in 1970 and 1972 during 9 and 12 cruises of the R/V “Akademik Kurchatov”, revealed the interannual stability of this flow, including the mass transport, approximately equal to 30 Sv, i.e. almost half of the volume of water carried by the Gulf Stream.
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