The Gulf Stream, the ocean current that carries heat to Europe and North America, is indeed slowing down and it might just stop. Scientists have even determined the time when a climate catastrophe will become imminent: the deadline is 2095. This is assuming that global warming slows down. If it intensifies, then by 2025 millions of people in Europe and North America will be hit by an unprecedented winter cold.
Frightening predictions were made by scientists from the University of Copenhagen, discovering new bad symptoms – a steady decrease in ocean temperature at control points. Thus, they confirmed their own fears of two years ago.
They supplemented the conclusions of their British colleagues, who, back in 2015, in an article that appeared in the journal Nature, reported: since the middle of the last century, the speed of the Gulf Stream has decreased by 15 percent and it continues to decline. As a result, the territories washed by it receive less billions of cubic meters of warm water per year. Although, perhaps, this is for the best – it is very hot in Europe at times.
Extrapolation of current results allowed the Danes to determine the probable timing of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, and indeed the entire Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – the system of currents in which it is included. The researchers published their arguments and calculations in the journal Nature Communications.
The Gulf Stream is hundreds of times more powerful than the Amazon – it carries about 20 million cubic meters of water per second from the tropics to the poles and back. With it, initially heated in the Gulf of Mexico, it “heats” Europe and North America.
The water that has cooled at the poles sinks to a depth and returns to the equatorial zone. There it heats up again, rises to the surface and again rushes to the poles. Such is the cycle, which is close to freezing.
This, by the way, was warned a long time ago by the The Day After Tomorrow blockbuster, in which catastrophic events began to develop just after the Gulf Stream stopped.
In 2010, NASA experts reassured the world community that data collected from satellites between 2002 and 2009 did indeed indicate a decrease in the speed of the Gulf Stream. But it is small – obvious and catastrophic deviations in the nature of the flow are not visible.
Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena – the director of those studies, assured then that the “The Day After Tomorrow” movie is pure fiction and there can be no such rapid climate change as in the movie, even under the worst case scenario.
NASA does not expect a new ice age at all. It is believed that global warming will eventually be stronger and the average temperature on Earth will still rise no matter what the Gulf Stream does.
European researchers, who take the exact opposite position, have come to believe, that fears – both past and present – are by no means unfounded. In their opinion, The Day After Tomorrow is a prophetic film and climate chaos has already begun.
