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<\/p>\nThe cooling of a patch of the North Atlantic known as the “cold blob” is being driven by a weakening of a major ocean current system that may be approaching a tipping point, according to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and reported by Phys.org on June 8.<\/p>\n
The findings add observational weight to a long-running scientific debate over the region south of Greenland and Iceland, which has cooled even as global temperatures have risen.<\/p>\n
The study attributes the trend to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a system of currents that transports warm surface water north from the tropics and cold, dense water south, regulating the redistribution of heat across the planet. A slowing of this circulation appears to be delivering less warm water to the area.<\/p>\n
The research team used observation-based reanalysis data for ocean heat content and surface fluxes, drawing on satellite and temperature measurements from 1955 and 1993, combined with climate models and a heat budget analysis.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The results indicated that the cooling is a deep-ocean phenomenon driven by changes in ocean heat transport rather than surface temperature changes.<\/p>\n
The data showed that surface heat loss in the cold blob region has decreased, contradicting the competing theory that increased surface cooling is responsible.<\/p>\n
“A further weakening of the AMOC could have major repercussions for future climate for millennia, given that the AMOC is known to have a tipping point beyond which it is likely to shut down,” the study authors wrote.<\/p>\n
The researchers said further weakening could affect weather, sea level and ecosystems, and urged policymakers to develop risk management strategies.<\/p>\n
“While large uncertainty remains over how close Earth is to this tipping point, standard CMIP6 simulations of future global warming scenarios suggest it is crossed in a substantial subset of these model simulations around the middle of this century,” the authors wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The cooling of a patch of the North Atlantic known as the “cold blob” is being driven by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[2095,64,63,7961,23017,45974,19158,128,3281,2489,3601],"class_list":["post-723134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-america","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-climate-crisis","tag-esg","tag-rem","tag-renewables","tag-science","tag-trump","tag-us","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}