Massive and sudden change in Ocean Behavior off Greenland
Greenland Sea Cold Water Re-Cycling Has Nearly Stopped.
Britain Expected to Become Cooler.
Summary:
Greenland Sea Cold Water Re-Cycling Has Nearly Stopped
May 11, 2005 Cambridge, England - Normally in the Atlantic Ocean,
warm water moves from the Equator up to the British Isles, keeping
England and parts of Europe warmer than Labrador which is at the
same northern latitude. The warming is caused by a huge convection
process called the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation, or North
Atlantic Drift. Equatorial warm water is circulated to the Labrador
Sea and Greenland Sea, cools off, and then sea ice forms. The ice
does not take up the sea salt which is left behind in the ocean and
makes the water denser and it sinks. For more than a century, at
least a dozen cylinder-shaped columns of cold water have been
sinking into the deep ocean and heading back south toward the Equator
which has kept the big conveyor belt of warm-to-cold-to-warm water
going in the Atlantic Ocean.
But now for the first time, Cambridge University Physicist, Peter
Wadhams, has discovered that those dozen cold water columns in the
Greenland Sea have nearly disappeared. He reported last week in
Vienna at the European Geosciences Union meeting about his field
research in the Greenland Sea. With a changing, slowing thermohaline
circulation, Great Britain and parts of Europe will become colder
over this century as the rest of the planet gets warmer.
