Lara
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How soon might the Atlantic Ocean Break???
Link: How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer — and Shook the World — WIRED
All of the planet is quilted in pink and red, the familiar colors of climate change. But in the North Atlantic, there’s one freak splotch of blue. If global warming were a blanket, the Irminger Sea and its neighboring waters are where the moths ate through. Scientists call it the warming hole.
The warming hole could be a very big problem. That’s because it’s a sign that something may be wrong with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The AMOC is the main current system that crisscrosses the ocean. It flows like a big river up, down, and across the two hemispheres. All that moving water performs an amazing service—it’s basically a supremely massive, 1-petawatt heat pump for the North Atlantic.
The mega-current hauls warm, salty surface water from the tropics near the Americas up to northern Europe. There the warm water meets cold air and evaporates. The atmosphere heats up. The water that’s left in the AMOC is now colder and saltier—which is to say, it’s much denser than the surrounding water.
And if you’re a cod swimming west of Iceland, you’re in for an astonishing show. Here the heavy AMOC water doesn’t merely sink, it plummets nearly 3 kilometers down. (Two miles!) Some 3 million cubic meters of water fall per second, in what amounts to the world’s most record-smashing, invisible waterfall. This cold river joins up with other falling water—more underwater cataracts—and crawls through the depths of the ocean, following the topography of the seabed, all the way to Antarctica. The flow intersects other currents, things get messy, and eventually the current rises to the surface near South America and continues its loop.
The big takeaway is a Europe that’s cozier than geography says it should be. That warm gift—the one where the AMOC dumps much of its heat near Iceland—helps, for example, the Norwegian city of Tromsø to enjoy temperatures as warm as –1 degree Celsius in late January, while, at the same latitude in Canada, Cambridge Bay often gets down to –34 degrees Celsius (or 30 degrees Fahrenheit and –30 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively). The heat delivery is also why the northern hemisphere is a few degrees warmer than the southern hemisphere and why Earth’s warmest latitude is (on average) not the point closest to the s...
How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer — and Shook the World — WIRED
Link: How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer — and Shook the World — WIRED
All of the planet is quilted in pink and red, the familiar colors of climate change. But in the North Atlantic, there’s one freak splotch of blue. If global warming were a blanket, the Irminger Sea and its neighboring waters are where the moths ate through. Scientists call it the warming hole.
The warming hole could be a very big problem. That’s because it’s a sign that something may be wrong with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The AMOC is the main current system that crisscrosses the ocean. It flows like a big river up, down, and across the two hemispheres. All that moving water performs an amazing service—it’s basically a supremely massive, 1-petawatt heat pump for the North Atlantic.
The mega-current hauls warm, salty surface water from the tropics near the Americas up to northern Europe. There the warm water meets cold air and evaporates. The atmosphere heats up. The water that’s left in the AMOC is now colder and saltier—which is to say, it’s much denser than the surrounding water.
And if you’re a cod swimming west of Iceland, you’re in for an astonishing show. Here the heavy AMOC water doesn’t merely sink, it plummets nearly 3 kilometers down. (Two miles!) Some 3 million cubic meters of water fall per second, in what amounts to the world’s most record-smashing, invisible waterfall. This cold river joins up with other falling water—more underwater cataracts—and crawls through the depths of the ocean, following the topography of the seabed, all the way to Antarctica. The flow intersects other currents, things get messy, and eventually the current rises to the surface near South America and continues its loop.
The big takeaway is a Europe that’s cozier than geography says it should be. That warm gift—the one where the AMOC dumps much of its heat near Iceland—helps, for example, the Norwegian city of Tromsø to enjoy temperatures as warm as –1 degree Celsius in late January, while, at the same latitude in Canada, Cambridge Bay often gets down to –34 degrees Celsius (or 30 degrees Fahrenheit and –30 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively). The heat delivery is also why the northern hemisphere is a few degrees warmer than the southern hemisphere and why Earth’s warmest latitude is (on average) not the point closest to the s...
How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer — and Shook the World — WIRED