Twenty years ago, the film “The Day After Tomorrow” described an apocalyptic world where a large part of the Northern Hemisphere found itself buried under ice.
This disaster scenario had as its starting point the sudden collapse of the Amoc, an acronym designating an essential component of the climate: the “Atlantic meridional overturning circulation”.
It seems unlikely that reality will catch up with fiction overnight.
But a new study published this month in the journal
Science Advances
reinforces scientists' growing concern about the state of Amoc, by managing to model its complete shutdown.
Powered by differences in water temperature and salinity, the Amoc is a complex system of ocean currents and eddies that regulates the heat of the Northern Hemisphere.
Often compared to a marine conveyor belt, it transports (at around fifteen million cubic meters per second) warm surface waters from the tropics to the…
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