The Malvinas current is actually an offshoot of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, a branch that veers northward along the South American continental shelf. The boundary between the cold Malvinas Current water and warmer inshore water parallels the coast until about the latitude of Buenos Aires, where the Malvinas encounters the Brazil Current. When the phytoplankton utilize the nutrients and sunshine at the surface, they grow rapidly, leading to high phytoplankton concentrations. The large difference in the abundance of phytoplankton chlorophyll is clearly visible in the SeaWiFS ocean color image. Because mass is conserved, convergence in one area requires an equal amount of divergence somewhere else to balance it.
Convergence zones are of interest to oceanographers for several reasons.
Because they frequently mark the boundaries of currents, their position can be used to model the interaction of different oceanic current systems. Obviously, biological oceanographers study them because they are areas of high biological activity, from microscopic phytoplankton to large fish like marlin or bluefin tuna. Even loggerhead turtles have been shown to frequent the area of convergence zones in the Pacific Ocean. A variety of remote sensing technologies can be used to view convergence zones, due to the abrupt changes in water mass characterisitics that define them. SAR is extremely sensitive to very small variations in the surface of the ocean, so it can actually be used to view the wakes of ships.