With unprecedented heat waves and record-breaking global temperatures, it’s hard to believe that there might be a place on earth that has actually COOLED since the industrial revolution. But, it turns out, there is such a spot. The COLD BLOB off of Greenland mystified scientists for years, but new studies have uncovered a scary reality – this cool patch might be a warning of the impending collapse of a vital earth circulation system. And the consequences would be dire.

In this episode of Weathered, we travel to the Gulf Stream with the new PBS Terra show Sharks Unknown to experience the AMOC first hand. And we ask, what is the likelihood that the AMOC will collapse, and what would the consequences be?

Weathered is a show hosted by weather expert Maiya May and produced by Balance Media that helps explain the most common natural disasters, what causes them, how they’re changing, and what we can do to prepare.

This episode of Weathered is licensed exclusively to YouTube.

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Sources:
Ditlevsen & Ditlevsen. “Warming of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation”. Nature Communications. 2023.

L. Caesar et al. “Current Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation weakest in last millennium.” Nature Geoscience. 2021

Chengfei He et al. “A North Atlantic Warming Hole Without Ocean Circulation.” Geophysical Research Letters. 2022.

Stefan Rahmstorf et al. “Exceptional twentieth-century slowdown in Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation.” Nature Climate Change. 2015.

Paul Keil et al. “Multiple drivers of the North Atlantic warming hole”. Nature. 2020.

David Armstrong Mckay et al. “Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points”. Science. 2022

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