Feng He explained that scientists are still debating what exactly weakens the AMOC and causes it to move towards a tipping point – if that is what it does.
“If there is anything at all that can resemble a consensus in the area, it is that the melting of ice from, among other things, Greenland will lead to the AMOC flowing more slowly. But my own research suggests that even that is not necessarily consistent with the data,’ He says. Last year He co-authored a paper in Nature Climate Change which showed that at the end of the last ice age, when melting ice masses in the Northern Hemisphere sent enormous amounts of fresh water into the North Atlantic – so much so that the sea level rose by 50 meters – AMOC not weakened. It was actually strengthened: “It is always difficult to make predictions, but when you also have to make predictions about something that we do not yet fully understand, it becomes even more difficult,” notes He.
Read the full article at: https://trace-21k.nelson.wisc.edu/pub/w230808_en.pdf