The North Atlantic Current was predicted to weaken

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The North Atlantic Current was predicted to weaken
The North Atlantic Current was predicted to weaken
Anonim

The North Atlantic Current, which carries heat from the tropics towards Europe, will noticeably weaken in the next century and may temporarily stop its movement in an unfavorable combination of circumstances. Climatologists write about this in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.

“Our models and calculations show that this will happen with a probability of about 15%. On the other hand, the chances that the global conveyor of currents will completely stop in the next thousand years remains vanishingly small. calculations to verify all these conclusions, the scientists note.

The researchers call a "conveyor" a system of interconnected deep currents that carry water across virtually the entire oceans. It exists due to the fact that the level of salinity and water temperature in different parts of the oceans differs markedly, which makes huge masses of water "travel" from the equator to the poles, carrying heat and energy with them.

In particular, the level of salinity depends on the amount of precipitation and the intensity of evaporation, so the water at the equator and at the poles contains less salt than in the tropics and temperate latitudes. The fresher and heavier water cools down at the poles, sinks to a depth and goes back to the equator, where it heats up, "floats", after which the circle is closed.

In the past, as climatologists now suspect, this cycle of currents worked differently than it does today, which may be due to the existence of an ice age that began about 2.6 million years ago. According to many researchers, at that time the "conveyor of currents" was greatly weakened or even ceased to exist, which led to the freezing of the planet's poles and the advance of glaciers to temperate latitudes.

The future of Europe

A group of climatologists led by Fred Wubs, assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, predicts that a less dramatic, but similar fate may await the North Atlantic Current, one of the key elements of this pipeline, in the next hundred years.

The researchers came to this conclusion by studying how the melting of Greenland's glaciers and the increase in precipitation in the North Atlantic will affect the behavior of ocean currents. The fact is that these processes saturate the near-polar waters with a large amount of warm fresh water, which noticeably reduces the difference in salinity and temperatures between the tropics and the Arctic regions of the World Ocean.

This, in turn, should slow down or even stop the flow conveyor. The likelihood of this is what Wubs and his colleagues tried to estimate using high-quality computer simulations of the water cycle in the North Atlantic. In these calculations, scientists took into account not only changes in the average salinity and typical temperature of surface waters, but also various random events, such as prolonged thaws and frosts, which can dramatically change the operation of the "current conveyor".

After calculating several thousand of the most likely options for the future of the North Atlantic, scientists have come to the conclusion that the main oceanic current of the region will indeed weaken, but at the same time there is an approximately 15% probability that it will stop. At the same time, as scientists emphasize, the work of the North Atlantic Current should subsequently be restored, which will exclude the possibility of irreversible changes in the water cycle in the World Ocean.

In the near future, Dutch climatologists are planning to carry out repeated, more detailed and lengthy calculations to test these conclusions. If they are confirmed, then the climate of Europe and the European part of Russia may become noticeably more severe than now, the authors of the article conclude.

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