A vital system of Atlantic Ocean currents that influences weather across the world could collapse as soon as the late 2030s, scientists have suggested in a new study — a planetary-scale disaster that would transform weather and climate.

Several studies in recent years have suggested the crucial system — the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC — could be on course for collapse, weakened by warmer ocean temperatures and disrupted saltiness caused by human-induced climate change.

But the new research, which is being peer-reviewed and hasn’t yet been published in a journal, uses a state-of-the-art model to estimate when it could collapse, suggesting a shutdown could happen between 2037 and 2064.

This research suggests it’s more likely than not to collapse by 2050.

Like a conveyor belt, the AMOC pulls warm surface water from the southern hemisphere and the tropics and distributes it in the cold North Atlantic. The colder, saltier water then sinks and flows south. The mechanism keeps parts of the Southern Hemisphere from overheating and parts of the Northern Hemisphere from getting unbearably cold, while distributing nutrients that sustain life in marine ecosystems.

The impacts of an AMOC collapse would leave parts of the world unrecognizable.

An AMOC collapse “is a really big danger that we should do everything we can to avoid,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a physical oceanographer at Potsdam University in Germany who was not involved in the latest research.

  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    An AMOC collapse “is a really big danger that we should do everything we can to avoid,”

    Hmm, that seems quite alarmist to me. It’s probably a hoax, but even if it isn’t, the effects are likely being over blown. An AMOC collapse would only cause a slight drop in GDP, a couple percentage points only, and it’s probably already priced in on stock markets. I also believe in the power of entrepreneurship to find solutions. I’ve got it! We dump a whole heck of a lot of salt into the ocean. Boom! I’ll head the start-up. We’ll just get our capital from investors like Black Rock and Bill Gates. Oh, and governments, of course. We’ll get governments to pay us to drive massive, diesel powered cargo ships, loaded with salt, out to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. See, market solutions. Oh man, ecological collapse is going to generate so much profit and shareholder value. Take that, doomers. /s