A new study has confirmed that the Gulf Stream, a crucial ocean current that helps regulate climate and sea levels, is weakening. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades. This slowdown has significant implications for the world’s climate, and scientists are concerned that it may be a sign of further weakening to come.
Original scientific work: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023GL105170
It has a plain language summary, nothing as far as dramatic. I definitely didn’t find any actual study predicting a collapse.
Plain Language Summary
The Gulf Stream is a major ocean current located off the East Coast of the United States. It carries a tremendous amount of seawater and along with it heat, carbon, and other ocean constituents. Because of this, the Gulf Stream plays an important role in weather and climate, influencing phenomena as seemingly unrelated as sea level along coastal Florida and temperature and precipitation over continental Europe. Given how important this ocean current is to science and society, scientists have tried to determine whether the Gulf Stream has undergone significant changes under global warming, but so far, they have not reached a firm conclusion. Here we report our effort to synthesize available Gulf Stream observations from the Florida Straits near Miami, and to assess whether and how the Gulf Stream transport there has changed since 1982. We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past. Future studies should try to identify the cause of this change.
