The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, of which the Gulf Stream is a part, may collapse by the middle of the century, or perhaps as early as 2025, according to a new study that was published on August 22, 2023 in the journal Nature.
According to scientists who were not engaged in this study, it is unclear when the critical system may tilt, and studies of the currents so far haven't revealed much in the way of trend or change. However, they concurred that these findings are worrisome and offer fresh proof that the tipping point may come sooner than anticipated. The AMOC would deteriorate during the course of this century, according to a 2019 research by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, although its complete collapse before 2100 seemed unlikely. The study authors sought to a much larger dataset that may demonstrate how the currents behaved in a time before human-caused climate change because the AMOC has only been consistently studied since 2004. According to Ditlevsen, this area of the ocean is warmed by water that the AMOC carries north from the tropics; as a result, if it cools, the AMOC is losing strength. To determine how the currents were altering, the authors first subtracted the effects of human-caused global warming on the water temperature.