The ocean is composed of interlocking regions, each with their own unique characteristics and advocates. All are special and worthy of study for their own complex attributes, including their impacts upon local environmental conditions. Some ocean regions, in the wider community of oceanographers and climatologists, are viewed as more important than others in that they influence the larger scale, even the global ocean and its function in Earth’s climate system. Each region responds to fluctuations in the large-scale wind and buoyancy-forcing fields across a wide range of time scales; a few feedback to these larger-scale fields, with far-a-field ramifications. Regional regimes may be centers of strong sea-air fluxes or conduits between larger ocean-circulation structures, such as between circulation gyres or between ocean basins, affecting the large-scale pattern of ocean temperature and salinity, ecosystems, and more exotic seawater properties. It is speculated that the behavior of a few regions might be enough to flip Earth’s climate system into another mode, perhaps one associated with the shifts between glacial/interglacial climate.

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