Gulf Stream Disruption

Perhaps lost among recent headlines about raging wildfires, powerful storms, and catastrophic flooding is a looming disaster that I talked about in Chapter Eleven of my book, Beyond Blind Faith: disruption of the Gulf Stream ocean current. Here is what I said in 2017:

As Greenland’s ice melts, it could trigger another kind of catastrophe in Europe. If you look at a globe, you will notice that Great Britain is about as far north as Canada. Yet the British enjoy a much warmer climate thanks to the Gulf Stream, the fastest ocean current in the world. The Gulf Stream transports warm water from near the equator up to the North Atlantic, where it thaws England and some other parts of Europe.

This heat conveyer belt keeps moving due to the relative salinity of ocean water, because water that is saltier is also heavier. As the warm Gulf Stream travels north, a lot of heat and water ascend into the atmosphere through evaporation. The remaining water becomes much saltier, and therefore heavier, so it sinks to the ocean floor in the North Atlantic in vast quantities before beginning its journey back to the south. This sub-surface waterfall in turn pulls more water northward.

But this tremendous flow of water can be interrupted if a sufficiently large body of freshwater intervenes. The freshwater dilutes the salinity of the Gulf Stream’s current, preventing it from sinking. The waterfall stops, and so does the northern flow of water. This makes Europe much colder, because the heat stays down south.

Does this seem far-fetched? It isn’t. It has actually happened. About 13,000 – 14,000 years ago, after several thousand years of retreating and melting ice, a huge ice dam in North America burst. Freshwater behind the dam rushed down the St. Lawrence River into the North Atlantic and disrupted the Gulf Stream. Europe was plunged back into an ice age (called the “younger Dryas”) for 1,000 years. Average summer temperatures in parts of northern and western Europe dropped as much as 16°.

Climate scientists tell us that a similar disruption of the Gulf Stream is unlikely during this century. But the salinity of the water in the North Atlantic has been slowly decreasing, the result of melting ice and increased precipitation in that area, so the possibility does exist.

A recent scientific study says that this catastrophe could be much closer to reality than scientists believed even just a few years ago. That study, authored by Niklas Boers of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, reports that rapid ice melting in Greenland and the North Atlantic region, as well as increased precipitation in those areas, has greatly weakened the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), of which the Gulf Stream is a part. The study reports that the AMOC is in fact weaker than it has been in the past 1,000 years.

Should the AMOC collapse—in other words, should the circulation of ocean currents in the North Atlantic be stopped or altered—this would not only bring frigid temperatures to northern Europe and parts of North America, but could also raise sea levels along the U.S. east coast, interfere with seasonal monsoon rains all over the world, and endanger the Amazon rain forest and the Antarctic ice sheets.

Climate change is real, it’s happening, and it’s getting worse. And it may be fulfilling biblical prophecy, as you can read in Chapter 11 of Beyond Blind Faith, entitled “Apocalypse Soon.” You can read that chapter in its entirety on this website, by clicking here.