A great armada entered the North Atlantic, launched from the cold shores of North America.
A great armada entered the North Atlantic, launched from the cold shores of North America. But rather than ships off to war, this force was a fleet of icebergs. And the havoc it wrought was to the ocean current itself.
This scene describes a Heinrich Event, or a period of rapid iceberg discharge from the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last glacial maximum. These episodes greatly weakened the system of ocean currents that circulates water within the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC for short, brings warm surface water north and cold deep water south. This oceanic conveyor belt is a major component of the global climate system, influencing marine ecosystems, weather patterns and temperatures.
It’s also regarded as a potential tipping element of the Earth's climate, meaning that a tiny perturbation could push the system to a point of no return. “That’s why a lot of people are worried about a potential collapse of the AMOC,” said Yuxin Zhou, a postdoctoral researcher in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Earth Science. A weakened AMOC would have a global impact, dropping temperatures in the northern hemisphere and raising them in the south. We’d see dramatic cooling in western Europe and eastern North America, and changes in the tropical rain belt that impact the Amazon and central Africa.
Read more at: University of California - Santa Barbara
Yuxin Zhou, postdoctoral researcher in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Earth Science. (Photo Credit: Harrison Tasoff)
