Vital Atlantic Ocean current system approaching “critical threshold”

A major Atlantic Ocean current, which is part of the Gulf Stream, may have been losing stability over the past century and could be “nearing a critical threshold”, reports a concerning recent study by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Influencing weather systems worldwide, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), transports warm water masses from the tropics northward at the ocean surface and cold water southward at the ocean bottom, which is most relevant for the relatively mild temperatures in Europe. A potential collapse of this system could have worrying global impacts on weather and climate patterns.

“The Atlantic Meridional Overturning really is one of our planet’s key circulation systems,” says the author of the study, Niklas Boers. “We already know from some computer simulations and from data from Earth’s past, so-called paleoclimate proxy records, that the AMOC can exhibit, in addition to the currently attained strong mode, an alternative, substantially weaker mode of operation. This bi-stability implies that abrupt transitions between the two circulation modes are in principle possible.”

It has been shown previously that the AMOC is currently at its weakest in more than one thousand years, reports PIK. However, so far it has remained an open question whether the observed weakening corresponds to a change in the mean circulation state, or whether it is associated with an actual loss of dynamical stability.

“The difference is crucial,” continues Boers, “because the loss of dynamical stability would imply that the AMOC has approached its critical threshold, beyond which a substantial and in practice likely irreversible transition to the weak mode could occur.”

Long-term observational data of the strength of the AMOC does unfortunately not exist, but the AMOC leaves so-called fingerprints in sea-surface temperature and salinity patterns of the Atlantic ocean. “A detailed analysis of these fingerprints in eight independent indices now suggests that the AMOC weakening during the last century is indeed likely to be associated with a loss of stability,” says Boers. “The findings support the assessment that the AMOC decline is not just a fluctuation or a linear response to increasing temperatures but likely means the approaching of a critical threshold beyond which the circulation system could collapse.”

The study warns of famine, extreme cold and rising sea levels if the Earth’s key heat distributor shuts down.

A number of factors are likely important for the phenomenon, factors that add to the direct effect that the warming of the Atlantic ocean has on its circulation. These include freshwater inflow from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, melting sea ice, increasing precipitation and river run-off. Freshwater is lighter than salt water and reduces the tendency of the water to sink from the surface to greater depths, which is one of the drivers of the overturning.

While the respective relevance of the different factors has to be further investigated, they’re all linked to human-caused climate change.

“I wouldn’t have expected that the excessive amounts of freshwater added in the course of the last century would already produce such a response in the overturning circulation,” continues Boers.

“We urgently need to reconcile our models with the presented observational evidence to assess how far from, or how close to, its critical threshold the AMOC really is.”