Gulf Stream Not Slowing
For some time now there have been stories circulating in the press that due to decreased salinity of the Atlantic Ocean that the Gulf Stream Current that keeps these Islands so unfeasibly mild could eventually stop circulating and plunge the UK into Canadian-like winters. Naturally the truth was closer to; “there was evidence that it might be but we are looking into it further”. Nevertheless environmental research group RAPID set up a team to investigate…
First, a bit of background: RAPID is a focused research program being run mainly out of the UK, but with contributions from Norway, the Netherlands and from the US. One of their main achievements has been to set up a mooring array (which consists of a dozen or so permanently attached monitors of temperature, salinity and pressure) that can continuously monitor the circulation in the North Atlantic across a section at 26°N. Measurements taken as the moorings were first installed were highlighted in the Bryden et al paper last year.
Now for the good news…
At the meeting this week, Bryden and colleagues gave an update of the work, specifically focusing on the first year of data from the moored array. This is the first time that there has ever been such a continuous set of estimates across the whole Atlantic and so reports of the size and nature of the variability were eagerly anticipated. And they did not disappoint! There were two key observations: first, that the approximations that had been used in the Bryden et al study were actually valid, and secondly, that the variations day by day varied by around 5 Sv (1 Sv is about 10 times the flow of the Amazon). The mean over the year for the MOC was 18 Sv - very close to what was expected and in the middle of recent estimates - and significantly, larger than the value seen in the 2004 snapshot. Given that degree of ‘noise’, this implies that no conclusions about trends over recent decades can be supported.
Its not happening.
Good, that’s one less thing to worry about.
Read the other day that far from sea level rising it may drop considerably due to loss of all the methane hydrates on the ocean floor. I am starting to get very confused. I think we should all make up own theories.
Canadian winter is not a calamity, after all.
Indeed Sophia, not a calamity but in a country which grinds to a halt with half an inch of snow it could be a tragedy.
Xogg, you have to remember that scientific theories are exactly that and nothing more. They are published in the expectation that they will either be held to be possibly valid or false upon critical examination by their peers and that process can take some time. These are only possibilities.
Even now we are not seeing the rise in sea levels predicted by the rate of melt in the polar regions. The reasons for this are many, the loss of methane hydrates is one but also more atmospheric water, partly due to increased evaporation and partly they are binding to industrial particulates - which interestingly contributes to dimming. They don’t call weather systems an example of chaos theory for nothing!
What!? You mean this article was wrong!?
What we should fear in 2006
http://tinyurl.com/8aem7
Mind you, there’s still five or six weeks left to go
Published: 22 Dec 2005
By: Bill McGuire
3. London/Thames Estuary Flood Defence Failure
4. Catastrophic Sea-level rise
5. Major Thames Valley/London Winter Storm
6. Strategic Earthquake
7. Climate-perturbing volcanic eruption
8. South-coast Tsunami
9. Sellafield explosion and fallout
10. Nuclear terrorist attack on the City
no good whatsoever and dilutes the arguments of the well informed; note that
some of the most scurrilous theories are paid for by the oil
industry…