Most simulations of our climate’s future may be overly sensitive to Arctic ice melt as a cause of abrupt changes in ocean circulation, according to new research led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Climate scientists count the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (or AMOC) among the biggest tipping points on the way to a planetary climate disaster. The Atlantic Ocean current acts like a conveyor belt carrying warm tropical surface water north and cooler, heavier deeper water south.

“We’ve been taught to picture it like a conveyor belt — even in middle school and high school now, it’s taught this way — that shuts down when freshwater comes in from ice melt,” says Feng He, an associate scientist at UW-Madison’s Center for Climatic Research.

In a study published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, Feng He and Oregon State University paleoclimatologist Peter Clark describe a new model simulation that matches the warmth of the last 10,000 years. And they did it by doing away with the trigger most scientists believe stalls or shuts down the AMOC.

Warming temperatures on Earth’s surface cause sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt, releasing fresh water into the ocean. Scientists widely believed that the freshwater influx disrupts the density differences in the North Atlantic that make the AMOC’s north-bound water sink and turn back south.

Building on previous work they note that “Without the freshwater coming in making the AMOC slowdown in the model, we get a simulation with much better, lasting agreement with the temperature data from the climate record. The important result is that the AMOC appears to be less sensitive to freshwater forcing than has long been thought, according to both the data and model.”

This is particularly important to climate models that evaluate how the AMOC will respond to future increases of freshwater from ice melt.

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