Shifting seas in the greenhouse? (original) (raw)

Nature volume 399, pages 523–524 (1999) Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 24 June 1999

The effect that global warming might have on the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean has been a topic of much speculation and research. On page 572 of this issue, Wood et al.1 present greenhouse warming scenarios computed with a climate model that, for the first time, gives a realistic simulation of the large-scale ocean currents without requiring artificial adjustments of the air-sea fluxes.

In 1987, in an article entitled “Unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse?”, Broecker2 warned that the response of the climate system to greenhouse warming might involve ‘mode switches’ of the Atlantic circulation. He drew this inference from palaeoclimatic data, indicating that such events had occurred in the past, and from early ocean modelling results. Initially, the idea was simply that a positive feedback meant that the large-scale overturning motion of the Atlantic (sometimes popularly dubbed the ‘conveyor belt’, in which warm surface waters flow northwards and cold deep water returns south throughout the Atlantic, acting like a central-heating system for Europe; see Fig. 1) could exist in two distinct states — switched on (as at present) or switched off.

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Figure 1: Simplified sketch of currents in the North Atlantic, showing the two main convection sites in the Greenland and Labrador Seas.

The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

Figure 2: Simulated water-volume transport of the Atlantic ‘conveyor belt’ (Atlantic overturning) in a range of global warming scena.

The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), PO Box 60 12 03, 14412 , Potsdam, Germany
    Stefan Rahmstorf

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Rahmstorf, S. Shifting seas in the greenhouse?.Nature 399, 523–524 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/21066

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