Climate change is slowing down the conveyor belt of ocean currents that brings warm water from the tropics up to the North Atlantic.
reaching back 120,000 years reveal the Atlantic overturning circulation has switched off, or dramatically slowed, during ice ages.It switches on and placates European climate during so-called 'interglacial periods', when the Earth's climate is warmer.
It would make them fresher at depth, deplete them of oxygen, and starve the upper ocean of the upwelling of nutrients provided when deep waters resurface from the ocean abyss. The implications for marine ecosystems would be profound., with predictions of a future collapse on the cards in coming centuries if greenhouse gas emissions go unchecked., we used a comprehensive global model to examine what Earth's climate would look like under such a collapse.
The first thing the model simulations revealed was that without the Atlantic overturning, a massive pile up of heat builds up just south of the Equator. Australians may think of La Niña summers as cool and wet. But under the long-term warming trend of climate change, their worst impacts will be flooding rain, especially over the east.We also show an Atlantic overturning shutdown would be felt as far south as Antarctica. Rising warm air over the West Pacific would trigger wind changes that propagate south to Antarctica. This would deepen the atmospheric low-pressure system over the Amundsen Sea, which sits off west Antarctica.