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The water in the Atlantic is constantly circulating in a complex pattern that affects the weather on several continents. And climate scientists ask a crucial question: whether this vast system containing the Gulf Stream is slowing down due to climate change.
If it changes significantly, the consequences are dire, potentially including faster sea level rise in parts of the United States East Coast and parts of Europe, stronger hurricanes to the southeastern United States, reduced rainfall in parts of Africa, and changes in the tropical monsoon. it could be. systems.
Now, scientists have identified early warning signs that this critical ocean system is at risk. a new analysis It was published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.
“I have shown that this gradual slowdown of the circulation system is associated with a loss of stability,” said Niklas Boers, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. a sudden transition to a much slower state.”
Alex Hall, director of the Center for Climate Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study, said that although the findings gave him no indication that any collapse of this ocean system could be imminent, the analysis offered a crucial reminder of the risks of interfering with currents.
“We’re poking a monster,” he said. “But we really don’t know what reaction we’re going to cause.”
Studying ocean systems is difficult for many reasons. One challenge is to have only one Earth, said Andrew Pershing, director of climate science at Climate Central, an organization of scientists and journalists focused on climate change. As a result, researchers can’t easily compare the two oceans—one ocean that deals with the effects of global warming caused by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and another that doesn’t have to contend with that problem.
Dr. Pershing lauded the analytical solutions scientists have come up with to study the ocean-spanning current complex known as the Atlantic Meridional Rollover Circulation or Atlantic Meridional Rollover Circulation. AMOC. Parsing over a century of ocean temperature and salinity data, Dr. Boers showed significant variation in multiple indirect measures of AMOC’s strength.
“The work is fascinating,” he said.
Dr. Pershing said the analysis supports the idea that AMOC weakened over the course of the 20th century. This is a critical area to study, as AMOC epitomizes the idea of climatic “tipping points”—hard-to-predict thresholds in Earth’s climate system, which once crossed have rapid, cascading effects well beyond where they occur.
“The biggest challenge is, what do we do with this information?” He talked about the new work.
Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer and dean in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech, said there is no doubt that climate change is affecting the oceans. He said there is broad consensus in his field that sea levels are rising and the oceans are warming.
Also, Dr. He described Boers’ work as “interesting” but said he was not convinced the findings showed that circulation in that ocean system was slowing. “There’s a lot to worry about with the ocean,” he said, as are the more precise concerns about sea level rise.
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