This blog post and the “Deep Dive” podcast on a paper “A pause in the weakening of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation since the early 2010s” by Lee et al. (2024) was created by NotebookLM. Deep Dive Podcast “Atlantic Current Stability Is Borrowed Time” powered by NotebookLM: Introduction: The Ocean's Alarming Story Just Got More... Continue Reading →
The Antarctic Slope Current (ASC) is the westward-flowing coastal current system around Antarctica, largely driven by easterly winds. It serves as a barrier to heat and salt exchanges between the cold, fresh Antarctic ice shelf region and the warm, salty Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) in the Southern Ocean. A weakening of the ASC allows more... Continue Reading →
The current state-of-the-art climate models suggest that the human-induced weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has already begun since the mid-1980s. However, continuous direct observational records during the past two decades have shown no clear sign of a slowing down of the AMOC. To shed light on this apparent contradiction, a new study... Continue Reading →
The Florida Current (FC) refers to the Gulf Stream across the Florida Straits between Florida and the Bahamas. Its volume transport has been measured continuously since 1982 using submarine cables across the Florida Straits at 27°N by NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML). A previous study (Piecuch and Beal, 2023) reported that the FC... Continue Reading →
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is the Atlantic component of the global ocean conveyor belt, which is a large-scale ocean circulation system that connects the Arctic, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans via the Southern Ocean. Predominantly driven by deep convection in the high-latitude North Atlantic Ocean, the AMOC carries heat, salt, carbon, and other... Continue Reading →
Ice sheet melting from Greenland's glaciers accounts for an increasing proportion of global sea level rise, losing ~330 billion tonnes of ice per year during 2006-2018 (compared to ~120 billion tonnes of ice per year during 1901-1990). A new study published in Nature Communications examined recent changes at K.I.V Steenstrups Nordre Bræ (66.53°N, 34.57°W), a... Continue Reading →
As the surface ocean warms and polar ice sheets melt due to increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, near-surface stratification is increasing almost everywhere, including the major deep water formation regions in the high-latitude North Atlantic and around Antarctica. As a result, the global Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC), also known as the global ocean... Continue Reading →
The Larsen ice shelves extend along the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula over the northwest part of the Weddell Sea. From north to south, these segments are called the Larsen A, B, C, and D, bordered by Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf south of the Weddell Sea. In 1995, the Larsen A ice shelf completely disintegrated,... Continue Reading →
A decade-long increase of the basin-wide sea level and heat content in the subtropical southern Indian Ocean (SIO) during 2004–2013 ended abruptly, immediately following the onset of the strong 2014–2016 El Niño. Interestingly, this unprecedented drop of the SIO heat quickly recovered during the weak 2017–2018 La Niña. A study recently published in Science Advances... Continue Reading →
Observations from Argo floats and satellite shows that the rate of global ocean warming during 2005-2015 is largely consistent with the climate simulations under the increasing greenhouse gas concentration. However, during that period, the southern hemisphere oceans have absorbed up to 98% of the net global ocean heat gain, while the warming of northern hemisphere... Continue Reading →
Ocean to Climate 