With climate change, a 1% increase in watts per square meter of heat energy is warming the ocean, causing seawater to swell, currents to flow stronger, and greater storms to rage. Ancient Greeks believed Oceanus, the ocean river, separated the known world from the unknown where sea monsters like the Kraken dwell. The ocean remains the mysterious wine-dark sea where we voyage out on the surface or survey from distant satellites, unable to see what lurks in the darkening depths below.
A New York Times article evoked our ancestral fears: “The warming atmosphere is causing an arm of the powerful Gulf Stream to weaken. . . The northern arm of the Gulf Stream is but one tentacle of a larger, ocean-spanning tangle of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.”
Some scientists fear that meltwater from Greenland is already inhibiting the northward flow of the Gulf Stream. They believe freshwater pooling over the briny sea will slow the current. They say one of the hallmarks of a shutting down of ocean currents is a cold blob of water they’ve identified beyond Newfoundland in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. “In short, the cold blob may signal that the northern arm of the Gulf Stream no longer arrives with the same strength to the North Atlantic,” said Peter de Menocal, president of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
