The movie “The Day After Tomorrow” shows how global warming causes the failure of a huge Atlantic Ocean current, which triggers catastrophic natural calamities, and establishes freezing surroundings in Europe and North America for weeks together. Researchers have found that this scenario is not far from reality.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a deep-sea warm water circulation system which helps regulate the climate of the earth. It has been discovered that the AMOC is far less stable than previously thought. Liu and his colleagues rectified the bias in the previous computer-based climatic models for their study.
They predicted that AMOC could completely disintegrate under climate-change pressures like dramatically increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This could lead to a wetter tropical Atlantic region and a much colder Northern Hemisphere.
Such an unstable AMOC scenario will happen only a several centuries from now, say the authors. Although they used only a single computer model and a single global warming scenario, the research has significance. For, its findings suggest that permitting for an unstable ocean current causes dire outcomes at the global level.
The findings of this research were published in the Science Advances journal.