The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is like a giant ocean conveyor belt, moving warm water northward near the surface and cold water southward at depth. It includes the famous Gulf Stream and plays a crucial role in regulating Earth’s climate and weather patterns. But climate change is melting Arctic ice and making northern Atlantic waters too fresh and light to sink—and that could have major consequences worldwide.
While the collapse of the AMOC was once considered “low probability,” the likelihood of it happening is increasing. In fact, it’s becoming so concerning to oceanographers that 44 of them, from various countries, wrote and published a call to action, warning that the risk of the AMOC reaching a disastrous tipping point is “greatly underestimated” and will have “devastating and irreversible impacts.”
Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer who runs the Earth system analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told LiveScience that the AMOC “really plays a very major role, and if it were to collapse, “there would be many impacts.”
“The most immediate one that people probably already know about is the cooling around the northern Atlantic, which is already there in the form of the cold blob,” Rahmstorf said. “It’s also in the air temperature around that region, it’s the only part of the world that has not warmed, but has been getting colder, in the last 100 years.”
He added that there would be more of a temperature contrast across Europe, which could lead to extreme weather events and impact ocean carbon dioxide uptake.
“We’d see the whole Northern Hemisphere cool compared to what it would be with just global warming [acting alone],” Rahmstorf explained. “In the Southern Hemisphere, greenhouse warming would get worse. There would be a shift in the tropical rainfall belts … You would also get flooding from tropical rainfalls shifting to places where people and infrastructure are not used to it.”
One of the 44 scientists who penned the open letter, the University of Copenhagen’s Peter Ditlevsen, added that this “can have very serious consequences for Earth’s climate by changing how heat and precipitation are distributed globally.”
“While a cooling Europe may seem less severe as the globe as a whole becomes much warmer and heat waves occur more frequently,” he said, “this shutdown will contribute to an increased warming of the tropics, where rising temperatures have already given rise to challenging living conditions.”
Some of the more specific impacts this could have include rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and severe ecological and agricultural changes.
In the call-to-action letter, experts wrote: “Even with a medium likelihood of occurrence, given that the outcome would be catastrophic and impacting the entire world for centuries to come, we believe more needs to be done to minimize this risk.”
The post 44 Scientists Just Warned Us About a Catastrophic Ocean Current Collapse appeared first on VICE.
The post 44 Scientists Just Warned Us About a Catastrophic Ocean Current Collapse appeared first on VICE.
