, researchers warn, which could staunch the flow of heat to the northern hemisphere in what could be yet another consequence of climate change.
"People would see severe and cascading consequences around the world," the authors, hailing from the Netherlands' Utrecht University, wrote in anThe beating heart of AMOC is a current called the Gulf Stream, which the authors describe as "the ocean's conveyor belt." In it, warm and salty water at the equator flows northward, passing through the Gulf of Mexico and the US East Coast and bringing heat to Europe, the authors explained.
But global warming could dramatically disrupt that. As ice sheets and glaciers melt, the fresh water they release dilutes the density of the ocean's salty water. The less dense the water, the less it sinks. Without sinking — which sucks water into the current — the weaker the entire conveyor belt is. At a certain point, you can say goodbye to this vital pipeline of heat to North America and Europe.
These extreme changes wouldn't happen uniformly, with some places getting colder than others, but on average both continents would cool by several degrees. Still, it's unclear when this tipping point will be reached. Some analyses have suggested that it could be as soon as several years, though the researchers note that there's great "uncertainty" over that forecast.
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