How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer—and Shook the World
How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Found an Answer—and Shook the World
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is like a huge heat pump, taking water from the tropics to the north, warming areas in Europe. But as climate change accelerates, AMOC is becoming less stable. It might even be headed to a shutdown.
Man, they buried the answer:
"Across a thousand runs, the model cranked through the temperature data and settled on a year. Sometimes the model spat out later dates. Sometimes earlier. The two scientists made a plot of the numbers and a neat cluster emerged. Yes—2057. But that’s just the middle point: In 95 percent of the model’s simulations, the AMOC tipped sometime between 2025 and 2095."
It was a good read I thought. It seems like these findings went a little viral, for scientific research that is and the author presumed their readers were already aware of the dates, rightly it wrongly.
I appreciate the insight into the work of scientists and the people involved. There should be more of that IMO.
So as soon as tomorrow as late as the next century? Fuck
It was very interesting listening to this article, cause it was like a story built around scientists who study the AMOC.
Just to note that there is a new study from June 2024 that mentions the following:
The collapse time is estimated between 2037-2064 (10-90% CI) with a mean of 2050 and the probability of an AMOC collapse before the year 2050 is estimated to be 59±17%.
(...) the probability of an AMOC collapse before the year 2100 is very likely to be underestimated in the IPCC-AR6 and needs to be reconsidered in the IPCC-AR7.
So probably not tomorrow.
Definitely the day after tomorrow.