The Gulf Stream is intrinsic to the global climate system, bringing warm waters from the Caribbean up the East Coast of the United States.
The Gulf Stream is intrinsic to the global climate system, bringing warm waters from the Caribbean up the East Coast of the United States. As it flows along the coast and then across the Atlantic Ocean, this powerful ocean current influences weather patterns and storms, and it carries heat from the tropics to higher latitudes as part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
A new study published today in Nature Climate Change now documents that over the past 20 years, the Gulf Stream has warmed faster than the global ocean as a whole and has shifted towards the coast. The study, led by Robert Todd, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), relies on over 25,000 temperature and salinity profiles collected between 2001 and 2023.
“The warming we see near the Gulf Stream is due to two combined effects. One is that the ocean is absorbing excess heat from the atmosphere as the climate warms,” said Todd. “The second is that the Gulf Stream itself is gradually shifting towards the coast.”
Read more at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
