A new statistical model has predicted that the collapse of Atlantic Ocean currents is likely to occur this century. The results would cause catastrophic temperature drops in the Northern Hemisphere, but other scientists are not so sure.

A vital ocean current system that helps regulate the Northern Hemisphere’s climate could collapse anytime from 2025 and unleash climate chaos, a controversial new study warns.

The Atlantic Meridional Ocean Current (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, governs the climate by bringing warm, tropical waters north and cold water south.

But researchers now say the AMOC may be veering toward total breakdown between 2025 and 2095, causing temperatures to plummet, ocean ecosystems to collapse and storms to proliferate around the world. However, some scientists have cautioned that the new research comes with some big caveats.

The AMOC can exist in two stable states: a stronger, faster one that we rely upon today, and another that is much slower and weaker. Previous estimates predicted that the current would probably switch to its weaker mode sometime in the next century.

Related: Gulf Stream could be veering toward irreversible collapse, a new analysis warns

But human-caused climate change may push the AMOC to a critical tipping point sooner rather than later, researchers predicted in a new study, published Tuesday (July 25) in the journal Nature Communications.

“The expected tipping point — given that we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions — is much earlier than we expected,” co-author Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics and stochastic models in biology at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science.

“It was not a result where we said: ‘Oh, yeah, here we have it’. We were actually bewildered.”

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
    2·
    1 year ago

    How can a current stop? It doesn’t seem like something that can break?

    Did we put to much trash in the ocean and clog it up?

    • NaN@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      8·
      1 year ago

      Warmer southerly waters, which are saltier and denser, flow north to cool and sink below waters at higher latitudes, releasing heat into the atmosphere.

      Then, once it has sunk beneath the ocean, the water slowly drifts southward, heats up again, and the cycle repeats. But climate change is slowing this flow. Fresh water from melting ice sheets has made the water less dense and salty

      This is the premise for the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow, itself based on the 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm (co-written by Coast to Coast AM radio host Art Bell). Not a new concern, I think the change for these guys is trying to put a timeline on it.

    • Zellith@kbin.social
      5·
      1 year ago

      Probably fresh water from north pole pushing southward and disrupting the currents cold/heat exchange when it mixes with salt water. But I’m tired so I’m probably wrong.