A Gulf Stream Shut Down - What If?

June 20, 2004 – Vol.9 No.13

A GULF STREAM SHUT DOWN - WHAT IF?

In the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow melting glaciers in Greenland and elsewhere on the globe have drained enough fresh water into the world’s oceans to interrupt the thermo-haline flow: The Gulf Stream has shut down.

In the movie the shut down and its consequences are almost immediate. It’s a movie, after all. There are only two hours to make the point.

There is historical evidence, however, that in the past the Gulf Stream has shut down, slowed, or altered course and with a change happening in as little as a few years. Weather patterns did change in Europe and North America because of it and it took decades, if not centuries, for the Gulf Stream to resume its course.

Britain’s climate prediction.net, a partnership of UK universities and the Met office, wants to know what would happen to the world’s climates if the Gulf Stream did shut down. Would a shutdown offset the warming caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases on the planet to trigger a cooling? What would the consequences be?

While no single computer in the world is powerful enough to answer those questions: climateprediction.net wants to enlist your computer to run a model to help answer them. The group has already run a less complex simulation using more than 49,000 volunteer desktop PC’s in 130 countries. The new simulation will show a rise in carbon dioxide and then a thermo-haline shutdown.

The model runs in the background, without interfering with other software. For now, only a PC version as available, but Mac and Linux versions are on the way. Only users who keep their computers running 24/7 are encouraged to run the model - it can take weeks for the model to give the results. Each download is different to determine a different result from a different data set. Visit climateprediction.net at http://www.climateprediction.net/ .