Ocean Currents Accelerating
The map here was created from a composite of readings from satellites and marine vessels. From Science Magazine:
The oceans’ great continent-wrapping currents, each one moving as much water as all the world’s rivers combined, can rightly be considered the planet’s circulatory system. And this circulation, it appears, has started to thump faster: For nearly 25 years the currents have been rapidly speeding up, partly because of global warming.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper today in Science Advances. Based on observations combined with models, the authors claim that from 1990 to 2013, the energy of the currents increased by some 15% per decade. “This is a really huge increase,” says Susan Wijffels, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “It’s going to stimulate a lot of other work.” If the acceleration is real, it could affect jet streams, weather patterns, and the amount of heat stored in the ocean’s depths.
This is a good example of the long and tedious process by which science wraps its wits around the myriad effects that a warming planet has on natural phenomena.
I’m guessing this particular finding might actually be a net positive, given our concern about a possible reversal of the gulf stream current due to weakening in thermohaline circulation. This, of course, is what provides a great deal of heat to the regions that surround the North Atlantic, Europe in particular.
If any oceanographers out there want to weigh in on this, that would be great.
Craig,
Curious!
Science Magazine, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science states “Ocean Currents are accelerating”.
However;
Inside Climate News, (A Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-profit, non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering climate change, energy and the environment), is equally emphatic that:
“Scientists have found new evidence that the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation has slowed by about 15 percent since the middle of the last century. If it continues to slow, that could have profound consequences for Earth’s inhabitants”.
[https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07052018/atlantic-ocean-circulation-slowing-climate-change-heat-temperature-rainfall-fish-why-you-should-care]
Who is correct, and who is wrong? Can they both be right?
What is happening here?
Well, it may be exactl7y that. Both are partly right and partly wrong!
As any Master Mariner knows, ocean currents fluctuate from time to time very widely in speed and even direction.
The ocean currents are complex and not altogether fully understood.
All kinds of factors and forces govern and affect the ocean currents. Wind, Coriolis, breaking waves, cabbeling, temperature,salinity, gravity, depth contours, earthquakes, under water volcanic activity, shoreline configurations,interactions with other currents, and a myriad of other factors.
The terrain of the planet, both underwater and on land is constantly changing. Some of the changes occur quickly, others over millennia.
Currents, like rivers, can he agents of change to the terrain.
It’s always a danger to interpret every natural occurrence through the narrow prism of “climate Change”.