Climatologists have shown that the Gulf Stream is slowing down, carrying less and less warm water to North America and Europe - and continues to weaken.
Global warming weakens the Atlantic current of the Gulf Stream, which brings southern heat to North America and Europe. Today, it has already turned out to be a record weak in the entire history of observations, and in the future it may completely disappear. Climatologists from the University of Potsdam write about this in an article published in the journal Nature.
According to Stefan Rahmstorf and his colleagues, the Gulf Stream (broadly defined as the entire system of warm meridional currents in the North Atlantic) is 15 percent weaker today than it was in the middle of the 20th century. This is a significant drop, reducing the volume of water carried by three million cubic meters per year - which corresponds to the flow of 15 rivers such as the Amazon. Scientists note that the speed of the Gulf Stream has been decreasing over the past 150 years, and today it has reached more than one and a half thousand years of minimum.
Normally, these currents deliver heat to the north from equatorial latitudes, and cooled cold water returns with deep currents. Their weakening may be associated with the abnormal summer heat waves that have been observed in recent years, and with the melting of glaciers in the Arctic and Greenland, developing at an alarming rate. According to Professor Ramstorff, "This is what climate models have predicted for a long time, although until now we were not completely sure that this is happening in reality."
Direct measurements of the speed of the Gulf Stream began quite recently, so the authors turned to indirect evidence, such as temperature measurements in various parts of the Atlantic Ocean and coastal countries. Note that another article was published in the same issue of Nature - its authors also studied the weakening of the Gulf Stream. However, David Thornalley and his colleagues at University College London relied on data on the bottom distribution of stream-borne particles.
Moreover, British scientists explained the weakening of the North Atlantic currents not by human influence, but by natural causes and changes in glaciers that began more than a century ago.
Sergey Vasiliev