We have already managed to get used to warm winters and hot summers, and therefore the snowy spring and the onset of the cold summer of 2017 in Russia contrast very much against this background. Scientists at the Potsdam Climate Research Institute warn that winters in Europe could get colder. Disruption of the circulation of water in the oceans and the slowing down of the Gulf Stream can lead to hard-to-calculate, but definitely negative consequences for the entire planet.
The Gulf Stream has slowed down
The journal Nature published the results of a study by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Research on Climate Change and its Consequences, led by Professor of Ocean Physics Stefan Rahmstorf.
Professor Stefan Rahmstorf
The main conclusion of this study is that the circulation of water in the oceans is slowing down and that one of the consequences of this may be a slowing down of the Gulf Stream. This in turn will lead to many disasters. Cold winters in Europe and strong rises in water levels that will threaten major coastal cities on the US East Coast, such as New York and Boston. According to them, the Gulf Stream, which brings a mild climate to northern Europe and favorable conditions for the inhabitants of the southeastern United States, is slowing down at the fastest pace in the last 1000 years.
Professor Stefan Ramstorf:
Promotional video:
The data obtained by the scientists confirm that as the global temperature rises due to climate change, the regions warmed by the Gulf Stream show a drop in temperature, especially during the winter period. The inflow of warm water from the equator, which flows across the ocean, passing the Gulf of Mexico and then up the western side of the UK and Norway, contributes to the warm climate in Northern Europe. This makes winter conditions in much of northern Europe much milder than they normally would, protecting these regions from a lot of snow and ice during the winter months.
Now, the researchers have found that the water in the North Atlantic Ocean is colder than computer models predicted earlier. They estimate that between 1900 and 1970, 8,000 cubic kilometers of fresh water entered the Atlantic Ocean from Greenland. In addition, the same source provided an additional 13,000 cubic kilometers between 1970 and 2000. This fresh water has a lower density than the salty ocean, and therefore tends to float near the surface, upsetting the balance of the huge current.
In the 1990s, circulation began to recover, but the recovery was temporary. New weakening is now taking place, possibly due to the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
At the moment, circulation is 15-20% weaker than one or two decades ago. At first glance, this is not so much. But on the other hand, according to scientists, there was no such thing on Earth for at least 1100 years. It is also alarming that the circulation weakening occurs faster than the rates predicted by scientists.
Researchers believe that the onset of the Little Ice Age around 1300 was associated precisely with the slowing down of the Gulf Stream. In the 1310s, Western Europe, according to the chronicles, experienced a real ecological catastrophe. The traditionally warm summer of 1311 was followed by four gloomy and rainy summers of 1312-1315. Heavy rains and unusually harsh winters have resulted in the loss of several crops and the freezing of fruit orchards in England, Scotland, northern France and Germany. In Scotland and northern Germany, viticulture and wine production then ceased. Winter frosts began to affect even northern Italy. F. Petrarch and G. Boccaccio recorded that in the XIV century. snow often fell in Italy.
In 2009-2010, American scientists have already recorded a sudden increase in water level in the Atlantic off the east coast of America by 10 cm. Then the current weakening of circulation was just beginning. In the event of a sharp weakening, the water level may rise by 1 meter. Moreover, we are talking only about the increase due to the weakening of circulation. Added to this meter is the rise in water expected from global warming.
Scientists have calculated that the warm current of the Gulf Stream is so powerful that it carries more water than all the rivers of the planet combined. Despite all its power, it is only one, albeit large, component of the global thermohaline process, that is, temperature-saline water circulation. Its key components are located in the North Atlantic - where the Gulf Stream flows. Therefore, he plays such an important role in shaping the climate on the planet.
The Gulf Stream carries warm water north into colder waters. At the Great Newfoundland Bank, it passes into the North Atlantic Current, which affects the weather in Europe. This current moves further north until cold waters with a high salt content do not go deeper due to their increased density. Then the current at great depths turns and moves in the opposite direction - to the south. The Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current play a decisive role in the formation of the climate, because they transport warm water to the north, and cold to the south to the tropics, thus constantly mixing water between ocean basins.
If too much ice melts in the North Atlantic (Greenland), then cold salt water is desalinated. Reducing the salt content of the water decreases its density and it rises to the surface. This process can slow down and even stop thermohaline circulation over time. Director Roland Emmerich tried to show what can happen in this case in the science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow (2004). In his version, a new ice age began on Earth, which provoked catastrophes and chaos on a planetary scale.
Scientists reassure: if this happens, it will take a long time. However, global warming is indeed slowing circulation. One of the consequences, Stefan Rumstorf notes, could be a rise in the Atlantic Ocean off the east coast of the United States and much colder winters in Europe.
Impact of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico on the movement of the Gulf Stream
On April 20, 2010, 80 kilometers off the coast of Louisiana, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, owned by British Petroleum (BP), which was developing the Macondo field, exploded. The oil spill that followed the accident (explosion and fire) became the largest in the history of the United States, turning the accident into one of the largest man-made disasters in terms of negative impact on the ecological situation and the environment.
Italian physicists conducted an experiment in which they used a bath of cold water to color warm jets of water. You could see the boundaries of cold layers and warm streams. When oil was added to the bath, the boundaries of the warm water layers were violated and the current vortex was effectively destroyed. This is exactly what happened in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Atlantic Ocean with the Gulf Stream. The river of "warm water" that flows from the Caribbean, less and less reaches Western Europe, it is dying from Corexit (COREXIT-9500), a toxic chemical that the Barack Obama administration allowed BP to use to hide the scale of the disaster in the explosion of the drilling platform in April last year. As a result, according to some reports, this dispersant was poured into the Gulf of Mexico about 42 million gallons.
Corexit, along with several million gallons of other dispersants, was added to the more than 200 million gallons of crude oil that was spilled over several months from a well drilled by BP at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. So it was possible to effectively hide most of the oil, dropping it to the bottom, and hope that BP will be able to significantly reduce the size of the federal fine, depending on the size of the oil disaster. Currently, there are no ways to effectively "cleanse" the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. In addition, oil reached the east coast of America and then flowed out into the North Atlantic Ocean. There, too, there is no way to effectively purify the oil at the bottom.
The first to report the stop of the Gulf Stream was Dr. Gianluigi Zangari, a theoretical physicist at the Frascati Institute in Rome, Italy. He said that due to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, glaciation "is inevitable in the near future." Before that, the scientist had already collaborated for several years with a group of specialists engaged in monitoring what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. His information is contained in a June 12, 2010 journal article based on Colorado CCAR satellite data agreed with the US Navy NOAA. This operational data of satellite maps was later changed on the CCAR server and the scientist claims that it was "falsification".
Dr. Gianluigi Zangari
Dr. Zangari claims that the huge amount of oil covers such huge areas that it has a serious impact on the entire thermoregulation system of the planet by destroying the boundary layers of the warm water flow. As a result, in the fall of 2010, the conveyor belt in the Gulf of Mexico ceased to exist, and satellite data from that period clearly showed that the Gulf Stream began to break apart and die about 250 kilometers east of the coast of North Carolina, even though the width of the Atlantic Ocean at this latitude exceeds 5000 kilometers.
In connection with the interest that aroused the topic of the "disappearance" of the Gulf Stream on the Internet, Russian scientist Professor Sergei Leonidovich Lopatnikov, author of two monographs and 130 publications in the field of physics, acoustics, geophysics, mathematics, physical chemistry, economics, wrote the following in his blog:
So what does all this mean? This means that violent mixing of seasons, frequent crop failures, and an increase in the size of droughts and floods in various parts of the Earth will continue to occur. In fact, the creation by BP of an "oil volcano" at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico killed the "pacemaker" of the global climate on the planet. Here is what Dr. Zangari says about this:
What do we have at the entrance? Warmer water gets in during the Gulf Stream. A fraction of a degree, but it matters. What do we have at the end? The westerly winds prevailing in the center of the Atlantic bring warmer and more humid air to southern Europe than before. The so-called "hot glass" over the flat territory of the Russian Federation in the summer, he could not break through and dumped moisture in the upper reaches of European rivers (in the mountains).
What is even more important is that the lenses of heavier petroleum fractions are “submerged” with the help of binding chemical preparations hundreds of meters deep into the lens. These inclusions prevent convection heat exchange between the bottom and surface water layers. At the same time, they were "drowned and okay." But because of this, there was a change in the viscosity of water saturated with an oil emulsion to great depths due to the treatment of the oil outburst with the binding agent Korexit.
As noted by Dr. Zangari, "The real concern is that there is no historical precedent for the sudden complete replacement of a natural system with a non-functioning human-made system." And worst of all, real-time data from satellites is clear evidence for Zangari that a new artificially created natural system has emerged in the Gulf of Mexico. Within this new and unnatural system, parameters such as the viscosity, temperature and salinity of seawater have radically changed. This stopped the millions of years running of the Ring Current in the Gulf of Mexico.
The opinion expressed by Dr. Zangari with mathematical precision and illustrated by the dynamics of satellite imagery is better to read several times:
Assumption of consequences
Meteorologists warn: planet Earth entered the so-called small ice age, which may be followed by a large one - this is when even dinosaurs began to die out on Earth. The first alarm bell rang in 2013, when the never-freezing Black Sea was covered with ice. Well, after the beautiful blue Danube and even the Venetian canals froze in Europe, a real panic began. What is the reason for such anomalies and how can this turn out for our planet?
Near Odessa in 2013, the sea was covered with ice to the very horizon
Due to the fact that the warm Atlantic current of the Gulf Stream changes its direction, by about 2025, a sharp cooling will most likely begin on Earth. In a matter of days, the Arctic Ocean will freeze and turn into the second Antarctica. After that, a thick layer of ice will cover: the North, Norwegian and even the Baltic seas. The navigable English Channel and even the never-freezing European rivers Thames and Seine will freeze. In European countries, frosts of forty degrees will begin. Cold winds will bring heavy snowfalls from the North Atlantic - as a result, all European airports will stop working and power supply to many cities will be cut off. In just a few weeks, all of Europe will plunge into pitch darkness, and then turn into an icy desert. All this, according to scientists' forecasts, is a very real scenario forwhich can happen in just 10 years. The earth will be on the brink of disaster.
Scientists around the world are sounding the alarm - in two years the Gulf Stream has deviated from its former direction by 800 kilometers and now, instead of moving northeast (to heat Europe), the warm current turns northwest towards Canada.
If this deviation turns out to be constant and the Gulf Stream never goes to the North Atlantic again, a global catastrophe will happen on Earth. The Gulf Stream will melt the ice of Greenland; a huge mass of water will rush to the mainland and actually wash away the entire North America from the face of the Earth, but this is not the worst thing. All this will set in motion the earth's plates, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, tsunamis will begin on the planet. Scientists predict that if this happens, two thirds of the population will die out almost instantly. In the Eastern Hemisphere: a new ice age will begin in Europe, Asia and even Africa, while the Western Hemisphere will literally be washed away by huge masses of water.
But the worst thing will happen later. According to scientists, in 10 years after the Gulf Stream changes its direction, the current may stop for good. To confirm or deny this assumption that the Gulf Stream really stops, Canadian researchers went to an experiment - they developed a special dye, poured it into containers and submerged it in the Gulf of Mexico to a depth of 900 meters. There, at a given depth, the dye containers explode, spraying the contents hundreds of meters away. The colored mass of ocean water pours out over the Gulf Stream. It is unbelievable, but the assumption about the stop of the Gulf Stream has been confirmed. The colored water did not really move towards Europe. Instead, the current has deviated 800 kilometers to the west and is now heading towards Greenland. That is why abnormal warming occurs in Canada, and instead of frost there, for which winter, temperatures of the order of +10 degrees and rains can be observed.
For the preparation of the article were used:
- article by Sergey Manukov posted on the website expert.ru
- materials from the site earth-chronicles.ru.