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.”
Just as a word of caution: a computer model is just a model. If there are enough parameters you can tune, it’s fun to play with, seeing what can happen. But just because you get a result from a model doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to happen. Models are written by people, they have software bugs, and more. Obviously they wouldn’t publish this unless they were confident, but the scientific method is a feedback loop, and we’ve only been through that loop once here so far.
What needs to happen now is other scientists need to recreate the model. If it turns out that multiple models point this way, then it’s time to panic.