![]() But that's not guaranteed in a warming world. Eventually, in and near the Arctic, it cools and sinks, traveling south along the ocean bottom.Īll of this depends on the waters near the Arctic cooling and sinking. This system brings warm water from tropical areas north on the surface. Advertisementįurther Reading Barents Sea seems to have crossed a climate tipping pointĪs for the Gulf Stream, it's part of a larger system called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Since that water is also relatively warm, the change is going to be exceedingly difficult to reverse. But, with the warming climate, the cold water gradually vanished, allowing Atlantic water to invade the Barents Sea. We covered one back in 2018, describing how a body of cold water in the Arctic's Barents Sea kept warmer Atlantic Ocean water out of that basin. What's a climate tipping point, and why do we think the Gulf Stream can be tipped off? Tipping points exist where a series of changes driven by warming act to reinforce each other, making it difficult to reverse them. And it finds that, for the UK, changes in precipitation may have a larger impact than changes in temperature. And a new study manages to separate out the effect of shutting down the gulf stream from the general impact of a warming climate. ![]() But calculations indicate that the shutdown isn't likely to take place until after the planet had warmed enough to offset this cooling.īut temperatures aren't the only thing affected by some of the tipping points we've looked at. The loss of this warm water would obviously result in a cool down in Northern Europe. But it can be difficult to understand the impact of tipping points, given that they're occurring against a backdrop of all those other climate changes.įor example, one of the major potential tipping points we're aware of is the shutdown of the North Atlantic's current system, which brings warm water north, moderating the climate of Europe. There's also the risk of pushing the climate past some tipping points, which can change the state of entire areas of the globe. ![]() While we track climate change as a gradual rise in temperatures, most of its effects are going to be anything but gradual: an increased risk of extreme temperatures and storms, extended droughts, expanded fire seasons, and so on. ![]()
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