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Causes, Effects & Impacts: Ocean currents

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Ocean currents

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Summary

  • Just like us, the Earth has a circulatory system. Instead of blood, oceanic currents transport heat, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nutrients around the planet.
  • The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) (Videos 1 & 2) is so powerful that it moves an area equivalent to the South Island one metre every second. It’s  warming faster than the global ocean as a whole, threatening the world’s largest ice sheet and disrupting global ocean currents, which in turn affect global weather systems. Recent modelling and observations shows it is slowing down.

As Antarctica melts, more freshwater flows into the oceans. This disrupts the sinking of cold, salty, oxygen-rich water to the bottom of the ocean. From there this water normally spreads northwards to ventilate the far reaches of the deep Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. But that could all come to an end soon. In our lifetimes. – England et al, 2023

Our new study has revealed that the Southern Ocean is changing, but in a different way to what we expected. We may have passed a tipping point and entered a new state defined by persistent sea ice decline, sustained by a newly discovered feedback loop…Antarctica is no longer the stable, frozen continent we once believed it to be. It is changing rapidly, and in ways that current climate models didn’t foresee. Until recently, those models assumed a warming world would increase precipitation and ice-melting, freshening surface waters and helping keep Antarctic sea ice relatively stable. That assumption no longer holds. – Silvano, July 2025

Climate models suggest a reduction in AMOC strength of 32 ± 37% by 2100 (90% probability, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways 2-4.5 scenario. Portman et al 2026

  • Ocean currents played a significant role in how the current Ice Age started. They’re now changing due to warming temperatures and feedback effects.
  • Perversely, the increasing frequency and intensification of upwelling in the Agulhas Current and East Australian Current is resulting in mass mortalities of fish, sharks, and other marine animals:

Extreme cold upwelling events that can result in mass mortality for diverse marine organisms are increasing in both frequency and intensity. – Lubitz et al, 2024

Summary

  • Just like us, the Earth has a circulatory system. Instead of blood, oceanic currents transport heat, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nutrients around the planet.
  • The Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) (Videos 1 & 2) is so powerful that it moves an area equivalent to the South Island one metre every second. It’s  warming faster than the global ocean as a whole, threatening the world’s largest ice sheet and disrupting global ocean currents, which in turn affect global weather systems. Recent modelling and observations shows it is slowing down.

As Antarctica melts, more freshwater flows into the oceans. This disrupts the sinking of cold, salty, oxygen-rich water to the bottom of the ocean. From there this water normally spreads northwards to ventilate the far reaches of the deep Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. But that could all come to an end soon. In our lifetimes. – England et al, 2023

Our new study has revealed that the Southern Ocean is changing, but in a different way to what we expected. We may have passed a tipping point and entered a new state defined by persistent sea ice decline, sustained by a newly discovered feedback loop…Antarctica is no longer the stable, frozen continent we once believed it to be. It is changing rapidly, and in ways that current climate models didn’t foresee. Until recently, those models assumed a warming world would increase precipitation and ice-melting, freshening surface waters and helping keep Antarctic sea ice relatively stable. That assumption no longer holds. – Silvano, July 2025

Climate models suggest a reduction in AMOC strength of 32 ± 37% by 2100 (90% probability, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways 2-4.5 scenario. Portman et al 2026

  • Ocean currents played a significant role in how the current Ice Age started. They’re now changing due to warming temperatures and feedback effects.
  • Perversely, the increasing frequency and intensification of upwelling in the Agulhas Current and East Australian Current is resulting in mass mortalities of fish, sharks, and other marine animals:

Extreme cold upwelling events that can result in mass mortality for diverse marine organisms are increasing in both frequency and intensity. – Lubitz et al, 2024

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