Critical ocean current has not declined in the last 60 years, AMOC study finds

Credit: researchgate.net

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The headline says it all. Time for persistent AMOC worriers like the BBC to pack up their coulds, mights and maybes and move on to other speculations. AMOC has many variables and alarmist guessing games are a waste of time.
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Earth, being 71% covered in water, is influenced by the ocean and its movements, says Phys.org.

In the Atlantic Ocean, a system of connected currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), moves water throughout the world’s oceans powered by a combination of winds and ocean density.

It not only distributes the ocean’s heat, moisture, and nutrients, but regulates the Earth’s climate and weather.

As the climate is continuously changing and the atmosphere is warming, many scientists fear that fresh water from melting polar ice sheets could significantly disrupt—or collapse—the AMOC. While a decline of the AMOC would have grave consequences, a collapse would be truly catastrophic.

However, studies about the AMOC’s long term future are uncertain. Instead of predicting the future, a team of scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) quantified the past to help inform where we could be going.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, scientists found that the AMOC has not declined in the last 60 years.

Authors Nicholas P. Foukal, adjunct scientist in Physical Oceanography at WHOI and assistant professor at the University of Georgia; Jens Terhaar, affiliated scientist at WHOI and senior scientist at the University of Bern; and Linus Vogt, visiting student at WHOI when he started to work on this study and now scientist at LOCEAN, Sorbonne Université, say their results mean that the AMOC is currently more stable than expected.

“Our paper says that the Atlantic overturning has not declined yet,” said Foukal, who conducted the research while at WHOI. “That doesn’t say anything about its future, but it doesn’t appear the anticipated changes have occurred yet.”

Their findings contrast with previous work, notably a paper from 2018 cited in their study, which reported that the AMOC has declined over the last 70 years.

This past work relied on sea surface temperature measurements to understand how the AMOC has changed, but “we’ve learned that sea surface temperature doesn’t work as well as initially thought,” said Terhaar, who began leading this study at WHOI as a postdoctoral scientist and completed the work in Bern.
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The paper states that air-sea heat flux anomalies in the North Atlantic are tightly linked to the AMOC and that “the decadal averaged AMOC has not weakened from 1963 to 2017.”

Since there are many processes that lead to large year-to-year variability in the AMOC, the air-sea heat flux and the AMOC are correlated strongest at those timescales, as opposed to annual averages.

Full article here.
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Image credit: researchgate.net