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An oceanic “conveyer belt” that pulls warm water from tropical regions up into the northern Atlantic and cold water back toward the south is now the weakest it’s been in more than 1,000 years, a new study finds. The work, published yesterday (February 25) in Nature Geosciences, aligns with earlier predictions and findings about the effects of climate change on what’s known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), but uses proxy measures to go further back in time and confirm the unprecedented nature of these recent changes.
“I think it just makes this conclusion considerably stronger,” Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a coauthor of the study, tells The Washington Post.
Rahmstorf and his colleagues compared the results from 11 indicators of the strength of the AMOC’s circulation, which has only been measured directly since 2004. ...
