This is a story that Cruising Odyssey has been covering from time to time for the last five years because it relates to how reliant we are on the Atlantic Ocean’s currents to provide our temperate climates in the US, Europe and Scandinavia. And, that will affect how we use our boats.
Based on an exhaustive study of Atlantic clam shells, the new report, published by a team from University of Exeter in the U.K., asserts that the data indicates that the Atlantic’s subpolar gyre is behaving strangely. The gyre delivers warm water to the north and ferries cold water to the south thereby creating temperate temperature on both sides of the Atlantic. Should the gyre fail, the climate of Northern Europe, in particular, will become colder and stormier.
The data was collected from the shells of two sets of oceanic clams, which have growth rings like the rings in a tree trunk. These carry specific data for each year of growth that scientists have used to create a model that goes back 150 years.
“It’s highly worrying,” study lead author Beatriz Arellano Nava, a postdoctoral research fellow in physical geography at the University of Exeter in the U.K., told Live Science. “The subpolar gyre was recently acknowledged as a tipping element. We still need to understand more of the impacts of a subpolar gyre abrupt weakening. But what we know so far with the few studies that have been published is that it would bring more extreme weather events, particularly in Europe … and also changes in global precipitation patterns.”
