However, a few areas to the east of the North Atlantic, which rely up on the warm water brought north by the Gulf Stream for their mild climate, take longer to recover.
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So far, the AMOC hasn’t had a major shutdown, but the increase in melting ice is slowing the process down, and scientists are worrying the Arctic will continue to pour fresh water into the belt, and disrupting the system.
It’s been over ten years since 20th Century Fox released ‘The Day After Tomorrow, ‘ a science-fiction movie centered around how climate change and extreme weather conditions could cause an apocalypse in the 21st Century.
By the time the climate events ended, the Earth was engulfed in global cooling and many people were left to live in a new ice age.
Sybren Drijfhout, a professor at the University of Southampton, said that a collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) could occur as a result of the continued warming of the Earth. Still, a researcher from the University of Southampton has taken the scenario and ran it through a state of the art climate model.
A collapse of the enormous ocean currents that circulate warm water around Atlantic could cool the planet so much that it would obliterate global warming for up to 20 years. From which point, global warming would continue as if the collapse of the AMOC had never occurred, however, global temperature offset would average around 0.8 degrees Celsius. However, the recovery period required by the Earth’s surface near the North Atlantic’s eastern boundary is more than hundred years, the researcher added.
Professor Drijfhout told Science Daily that “when the heat flow is reversed from the ocean into the atmosphere”, the ensuing “energy flow” make it “possible to attribute the cause of a climate hiatus period”.
When a similar cooling or reduced heating is caused by volcanic eruptions or decreasing greenhouse emissions the heat flow is reversed, from the ocean into the atmosphere.
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However, the study, which appears in Nature Scientific Reports, says that the recent period of very weak warming can not be attributed to one single cause. A similar reversal of energy flow is also visible at the top of the atmosphere. This event was recently observed during the climate hiatus over the past 15 years. Due to the El Niño phenomenon along wth significant changes in the Southern Ocean in the Antarctic region, ocean temperatures and levels are constantly shifting and increasing.
