European cities could face -55°F temperatures: The catastrophic outcome if vital ocean currents collapse

Moving through the Atlantic Ocean is a massive current that moves roughly 17 million cubic meters of water every second from one Pole to the other. It works a bit like a massive central heating and cooling system, taking warm water north and cold water south.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, helps keep the winters in Europe mild, but that could drastically change if it slows down or even collapses. The consequences of the AMOC slowing down were recently laid out in a study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Temperatures could plunge and storms increase if AMOC slows

A pair of researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, René van Westen and Michiel Baatsen, used the Community Earth System Model (CESM) to simulate what would happen to the climate decades into the future. Their model analyzed what things would look like after things stabilized if global temperatures warm by 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times and the AMOC weakened by 80%.

They found that there would be substantial cooling in Europe during winter months with extreme cold spells. Temperatures could plunge to minus 55 degrees Fahrenheit in Oslo, twenty degrees colder than pre-industrial times. And it would be below freezing for 169 days per year compared to 95 days before humans began burning fossil fuels.

Across much of northern Europe similar scenarios would play out with more days with temperatures below freezing and more extreme cold spells. This could be disastrous for food security as crops would not be able to grow and infrastructure that isn’t designed to handle such extremes.

Furthermore, the jet stream would strengthen along with storms due to heightened temperature differences between northern and southern Europe. Greater storm intensity would be most acute over northwestern Europe according to the researchers’ simulations.

Additionally, sea ice could push as far south as the Netherlands and the east coast of the United Kingdom and cover the Baltic completely. As well as engulfing parts of Scotland, Scandinavia and northern continental Europe.

This “completely shifts the narrative, right? Because now policy is planning for a warmer future, but maybe instead, we need to also prepare for a colder future,” van Westen told CNN.

Despite these predictions of extremely cold winters in Europe, large swaths of the continent would still face extreme heatwaves in the summer months with thermometers registering temps in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The United States and the Southern Hemisphere will get warmer

While Europe would see more extreme winters, the United States, on the other hand, would have slightly warmer winters and fewer days below freezing. The Southern Hemisphere would see a similar pattern but with even warmer temperatures in the winter months.

You can explore how it would affect Europe and other parts of the world on an interactive map they created.

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