Scientist examines climate scenario featured in ‘The Day After Tomorrow’

“The basic scenario of the AMOC as a result of global warming is not completely out of the blue or unthinkable”, the study’s author, Sybren Drijfhout, told The Washington Post.

While the film was Hollywood fiction that was filled with many scientific inaccuracies, a recently published study suggests that a catastrophic scenario such as on the movie, could indeed be a possibility if the world’s climate warming caused the world’s ocean currents to collapse.

Prof. Sybren Drijfhout, of the University of Southampton, said a collapse of the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) may occur because of the continuous warming of Earth. This has been observed throughout the climate hiatus of the past one and half decades. A similar reversal of energy flow is also visible at the top of the atmosphere.

Extended climate change can be represented by a forced response, which can be identified using a box model containing two layers.

With that said, the recent period of very weak warming can not be attributed to one single cause. However, a few areas to the east of the North Atlantic, which rely up on the warm water brought north by the Gulf Stream for their mild climate, take longer to recover.

The 2004 blockbuster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” is all about the disastrous effects of the collapse of a massive temperature-driven ocean circulation system.

In about 20 years, the Earth may experience a significant drop in estimated average temperatures, coupled with giant tsunamis, resembling disaster films.

Near the end of “The Day After Tomorrow”, the heroes reach a library buried in snow, its occupants surviving just barely on the heat of burned books.

“When a similar cooling or reduced heating is caused by volcanic eruptions or decreasing greenhouse emissions the heat flow is reversed, from the ocean into the atmosphere”, Professor Drijfhout exaplained in the release. These scenes of the movie received a few criticisms from climate scientists and it affected the scientific reliability of the film.

According to the oceanography and climate physics professor, current warming patterns not only indicate that a collapse of the AMOC is possible, but also that resulting consequences would resemble “The Day After Tomorrow”, though not to the same extremes.

Drijfhout said that the Earth will be cooling continuously for twenty years if global warming and AMOC collapse take place simultaneously. But it will take over a century in the place close to the eastern boundary of North Atlantic. Presumably, El Niño has a role and perhaps also changes in the Southern Ocean because of shifting and increasing westerlies.