Gulf Stream weakening now 99% certain, and ramifications will be global

A color-enhanced image of surface water temperatures shows the Gulf Stream crossing the Atlantic Ocean from the Florida Straits. (Image credit: NOAA/NESDIS)

The Gulf Stream is almost certainly weakening, a new study has confirmed.

The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades, with grave implications for the world's climate.

The ocean current starts near Florida and threads a belt of warm water along the U.S. East Coast and Canada before crossing the Atlantic to Europe. The heat it transports is essential for maintaining temperate conditions and regulating sea levels.

But this stream is slowing down, researchers wrote in a study published Sept. 25 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"This is the strongest, most definitive evidence we have of the weakening of this climatically-relevant ocean current," lead-author Christopher Piecuch, a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said in a statement.

The Gulf Stream is just a small component of the thermohaline circulation — a global conveyor belt of ocean currents that moves oxygen, nutrients, carbon and heat around the planet, while also helping to control sea levels and hurricane activity.

Beginning in Caribbean before flowing out into the Atlantic through the Florida Straits, the Gulf Stream brings warmer southerly waters (which are saltier and denser) northward to cool and sink in the North Atlantic. After dropping deep beneath the ocean and releasing its heat into the atmosphere, the water slowly drifts southward, where it heats up again and the cycle repeats.

This process is vital for maintaining temperatures and sea levels across the U.S. East Coast — whose waters are kept up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) lower than water further offshore by the sweeping motion of the current.

As Earth’s climate warms, an enormous influx of cold, fresh water from melting ice sheets is spilling into oceans, possibly causing the Gulf Stream to slow or even veer toward outright collapse, according to scientists. But due to the scale and complexity of the system, this is hard to prove.

To find definitive evidence that the stream is slowing, scientists analyzed data spanning 40 years from three separate sources — undersea cables, satellite altimetry and observations made on site — to observe the motions of the current around the Florida Straits.

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Their statistical analysis revealed that the current had slowed by 4%, with just a 1% chance of their measurement being a fluke caused by random fluctuations.

At first glance, a 4% shift may seem like a miniscule change, but "the worry is that's just the slow start," Helen Czerski, an oceanographer at University College London (UCL) who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

"It's like those early days of COVID. People were like: 'Oh, there's only 60 cases. We don't care about this,'" she added. "There's only 60 cases, yeah, but yesterday there were 30 and the day before that there were 15. If you just think a week ahead, we've got a problem."

To find definitive proof that climate change is the culprit, scientists will need to tease apart the differences between the natural variability of the ocean systems and the impact made by global heating — a tricky task given the relatively short time that humans have been directly measuring the ocean flows in detail.

Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

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9 Comments Comment from the forums

Zaphod4prez

Who did this study? Chicken Little? I put very little faith in any study. Studies are fickle things. They change more than any typical scientist's underwear.
Reply
Zaphod4prez

admin said:
A new analysis has concluded that the Gulf Stream is definitely slowing, but whether it's due to climate change is hard to tell.

Gulf Stream weakening now 99% certain, and ramifications will be global : Read more
Just what we don't need... More studies Done by Chicken Little.
Reply
ReasonableSkeptic

The study was written by two climate scientists - one at Woods Hole Oceanographic and the other at the University of Miami. You could see this yourself if you bothered to look at the study. Do you just come here to troll? You don't seem to have anything useful to say.
Reply
WatchfulFox

The presumption that because a highly contagious disease spreads exponentially through an unvaccinated population of means the gulf stream which has slowed roughly 4% over a 40 year period will suddenly accelerate that process and stop within the next 400 years seems rather extreme.
Did they take into account the reduction of cloud cover since lowering the sulphur content of ships exhaust in the seas around Florida that used to seed clouds there and cause less sun to strike the water? Did they take into consideration that the Earth's magnetic field is in the process of flipping north to south and has shifted several degrees in that time? Did they take into account the fact that we are in a period of warming for all the time that weather data has been collected and at the start of that data collection the earth was coming out of a very cold period? Did they take into account the fact that we are experiencing an extremely active period of increased solar radiation and solar flares over the last decades?
When scientists find exactly what they are looking for, you have to question the science.
Rather than throwing away money trying to stop what cannot be stopped we should clean up the oceans of the plastic islands, clean up the land of the microplastic dust we've coated the globe with and work on adapting to living in a dynamic and changing planet rather than trying to prevent it's changes.
A good analogy is: Make a better light bulb instead of trying to slow down the global rotation so it stays light longer.
Stop polluting but don't be expecting your efforts to change what the planet does naturally over the course of millions of years.
Earth went through warming and cooling period before we were here and will continue after we are gone. We shouldn't be trying to stop the thermostat at the point where we find it comfortable for us.
Some say, perhaps without sufficient evidence, that the warming is happening faster than it ever has before but even if that's true, that might be the natural cycle; slower temperature swings gradually decreasing in both severity and duration over time.
We just don't have enough date to know what we don't know.
Reply
Reality Checker

ReasonableSkeptic said:
The study was written by two climate scientists - one at Woods Hole Oceanographic and the other at the University of Miami. You could see this yourself if you bothered to look at the study. Do you just come here to troll? You don't seem to have anything useful to say.
I read the article/study in its entirety and will now show that it is alarmist (at best) and written by people who's careers are maintained by being published (the worst).

I will keep the mathematics at the 4th grade level and keep this short and sweet so no one can say "I just skipped the dissertation, I refuse to read all that you troll!"

Recorded history is ~4000 years. Some may argue that it is longer than this but it only improves my point.
Scientifically rigorous recorded history of the gulf stream is 40 years (from the study)
The last major extinction was 65,000,000 years ago (caused definitively by an asteroid, not dinosaur farts or other causes)

So we have been rigorously monitoring the gulf stream for 1% of recorded human history.
We have been rigorously monitoring the gulf stream for 0.0000000006% of earth's history since the last major extinction.

Making projections based on such limited data is like predicting the weather 4 days from now, in the former case and exclaiming "the temperature dropped 20 degrees from yesterday to today, therefore tomorrow it will drop another 20, the day after that 20, and so on thus we will be 80 degrees colder in 4 days (or using the study's numbers- 160 years).

The phrase in the article reading "the worry is that's just the slow start" is where everyone's BS alarm should start to go off. What justifies this worry? It certainly isn't the data that has been collected over the past 40 years.

You may as well start to worry about continental drift, and what we can do to stop it! If recent projections worked out on a supercomputer are true - they're not- notice Florida does not disappear as both poles completely melt (ha ha ha).If that ridiculously priced study is correct, all the continents will come together in around 250 million years, the gulf stream will definitely be completely gone.

Conclusion: Article is alarmist. Linked study is well written, but clearly not definitive.

Let's start putting that collective brainpower to solving problems that exist right now, that are solvable- Not doing service to movies like "The day after tomorrow" that show this current collapsing in weeks.
Reply
Bruzote

WatchfulFox said:
The presumption that because a highly contagious disease spreads exponentially through an unvaccinated population of means the gulf stream which has slowed roughly 4% over a 40 year period will suddenly accelerate that process and stop within the next 400 years seems rather extreme.
Did they take into account the reduction of cloud cover since lowering the sulphur content of ships exhaust in the seas around Florida that used to seed clouds there and cause less sun to strike the water? Did they take into consideration that the Earth's magnetic field is in the process of flipping north to south and has shifted several degrees in that time? Did they take into account the fact that we are in a period of warming for all the time that weather data has been collected and at the start of that data collection the earth was coming out of a very cold period? Did they take into account the fact that we are experiencing an extremely active period of increased solar radiation and solar flares over the last decades?
When scientists find exactly what they are looking for, you have to question the science.
Rather than throwing away money trying to stop what cannot be stopped we should clean up the oceans of the plastic islands, clean up the land of the microplastic dust we've coated the globe with and work on adapting to living in a dynamic and changing planet rather than trying to prevent it's changes.
A good analogy is: Make a better light bulb instead of trying to slow down the global rotation so it stays light longer.
Stop polluting but don't be expecting your efforts to change what the planet does naturally over the course of millions of years.
Earth went through warming and cooling period before we were here and will continue after we are gone. We shouldn't be trying to stop the thermostat at the point where we find it comfortable for us.
Some say, perhaps without sufficient evidence, that the warming is happening faster than it ever has before but even if that's true, that might be the natural cycle; slower temperature swings gradually decreasing in both severity and duration over time.
We just don't have enough date to know what we don't know.
You are engaging in a "flood the zone" approach to dialogue by essentially trying to shut it down with endless accusations that take much less time to submit than answer. Yours is not a sincere attempt to understand things, rather it is a clear attempt to shut down discourse and claim by fiat you are right and others wrong. Good for you, troll.

Regarding the virus pandemic analogy, it is an analogy regarding exponential or rapid growth. It's not hard to understand. It is only a general appeal to understanding that small things can lead to big things. Don't be scared of that. Don't attack the messenger. Just settle on understanding. Breathe deep and remain calm.

Now, regarding all your questions about what was taken into account. First, they are reporting on an observational study. If you can't handle what that means, check out and watch from the sidelines. Stop trying to overload everyone else with your ignorance. This article does not seem to say the study authors make claims about the decay rate of the current flow beyond the observational window. So don't act like they owe you an explanation.

Finally, you seem to have a gross misunderstanding of what the current threats are from ACGW and why. You also seem to mix that with your confusion about natural variation and the time scales involved versus ACGW. You also encourage a quitter's attitude to learning and acting. The reality is that a decision to do nothing is still a decision. So, complaining that people want to suggest actions without enough data to satisfy *your* worries is not a solution, just a useless complaint.
Reply
xoLaurenxo

This was a fantastic article.. I am from Massachusetts. I go to CAPE COD regularly and if you spend 3 months away and return there is such a drastic change in the beaches, the dunes, the canals.... Etc. It's so saddening! My children, more than likely, will not be able to keep our tradition alive - going to the same beach I've been going to since I was a child- due to climate change and erosion of the dunes. I wish there was something I could do, but it has to be a worldwide action/ commitment to care better for our Mother Earth & her nature!
I LOVE the ocean and everything in it.
Reply
fcallahan

Zaphod4prez said:
Who did this study? Chicken Little? I put very little faith in any study. Studies are fickle things. They change more than any typical scientist's underwear.
It's reasonable to not base final conclusions on the results of one study. However, as the weight of evidence piles up supporting the predictions that climate scientists made decades ago, that the steady pollution of the atmosphere with human emitted greenhouse gases will lead to accelerating global heating, maybe it's time to ignore evidence free intuitions and start listening to the scientific experts in the field.
As Isaac Asimov famously said:
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
Reply
DKATyler

WatchfulFox said:
The presumption that because a highly contagious disease spreads exponentially through an unvaccinated population of means the gulf stream which has slowed roughly 4% over a 40 year period will suddenly accelerate that process and stop within the next 400 years seems rather extreme.
Did they take into account the reduction of cloud cover since lowering the sulphur content of ships exhaust in the seas around Florida that used to seed clouds there and cause less sun to strike the water? Did they take into consideration that the Earth's magnetic field is in the process of flipping north to south and has shifted several degrees in that time? Did they take into account the fact that we are in a period of warming for all the time that weather data has been collected and at the start of that data collection the earth was coming out of a very cold period? Did they take into account the fact that we are experiencing an extremely active period of increased solar radiation and solar flares over the last decades?
When scientists find exactly what they are looking for, you have to question the science.
Rather than throwing away money trying to stop what cannot be stopped we should clean up the oceans of the plastic islands, clean up the land of the microplastic dust we've coated the globe with and work on adapting to living in a dynamic and changing planet rather than trying to prevent it's changes.
A good analogy is: Make a better light bulb instead of trying to slow down the global rotation so it stays light longer.
Stop polluting but don't be expecting your efforts to change what the planet does naturally over the course of millions of years.
Earth went through warming and cooling period before we were here and will continue after we are gone. We shouldn't be trying to stop the thermostat at the point where we find it comfortable for us.
Some say, perhaps without sufficient evidence, that the warming is happening faster than it ever has before but even if that's true, that might be the natural cycle; slower temperature swings gradually decreasing in both severity and duration over time.
We just don't have enough date to know what we don't know.
My house had a leak, I didn't blame the rain and declare it natural and do nothing. Instead: first I verified the roof was leaking. Then patched the hole.

What this study definitively declares: The gulf stream is slowing. It does not purport to say "global warming" "poles flipping" but instead: It's slowing. Time to prepare for it to stop completely.

It'd be nice if we could fix the earth, but as far as this article is concerned, get ready for a very significant sea level rise on the u.s. east coast, and freezing in Europe. Preparing for that is dirt cheap compared to later. Back to my house, if I waited till I had mold, it'd have been thousands to fix instead of merely tens (almost $100)
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