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The Great Climate Flip-Flop

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Mon, 08 Jul 2024 10:28:13 +0000

Eventually that helps to melt ice sheets elsewhere. Recovery would be very slow. Once the dam is breached, the rushing waters erode an ever wider and deeper path.

Three Sheets To The Wind Synonym

The North Atlantic Current is certainly something big, with the flow of about a hundred Amazon Rivers. Civilizations accumulate knowledge, so we now know a lot about what has been going on, what has made us what we are. Perish in the act: Those who will not act. In Greenland a given year's snowfall is compacted into ice during the ensuing years, trapping air bubbles, and so paleoclimate researchers have been able to glimpse ancient climates in some detail. Then it was hoped that the abrupt flips were somehow caused by continental ice sheets, and thus would be unlikely to recur, because we now lack huge ice sheets over Canada and Northern Europe. The sheet in 3 sheets to the wind crossword puzzles. Alas, further warming might well kick us out of the "high state. " At the same time that the Labrador Sea gets a lessening of the strong winds that aid salt sinking, Europe gets particularly cold winters. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. From there it was carried northward by the warm Norwegian Current, whereupon some of it swung west again to arrive off Greenland's east coast—where it had started its inch-per-second journey. This would be a worldwide problem—and could lead to a Third World War—but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food.

The Sheet In 3 Sheets To The Wind Crossword Puzzles

This warm water then flows up the Norwegian coast, with a westward branch warming Greenland's tip, at 60°N. It, too, has a salty waterfall, which pours the hypersaline bottom waters of the Nordic Seas (the Greenland Sea and the Norwegian Sea) south into the lower levels of the North Atlantic Ocean. The high state of climate seems to involve ocean currents that deliver an extraordinary amount of heat to the vicinity of Iceland and Norway. Define 3 sheets to the wind. Fjords are long, narrow canyons, little arms of the sea reaching many miles inland; they were carved by great glaciers when the sea level was lower. But the regional record is poorly understood, and I know at least one reason why. By 250, 000 years ago Homo erectushad died out, after a run of almost two million years. The cold, dry winds blowing eastward off Canada evaporate the surface waters of the North Atlantic Current, and leave behind all their salt. Coring old lake beds and examining the types of pollen trapped in sediment layers led to the discovery, early in the twentieth century, of the Younger Dryas.

Define 3 Sheets To The Wind

To stabilize our flip-flopping climate we'll need to identify all the important feedbacks that control climate and ocean currents—evaporation, the reflection of sunlight back into space, and so on—and then estimate their relative strengths and interactions in computer models. By 1971-1972 the semi-salty blob was off Newfoundland. If blocked by ice dams, fjords make perfect reservoirs for meltwater. Abortive responses and rapid chattering between modes are common problems in nonlinear systems with not quite enough oomph—the reason that old fluorescent lights flicker. North-south ocean currents help to redistribute equatorial heat into the temperate zones, supplementing the heat transfer by winds. Three sheets to the wind synonym. By 1987 the geochemist Wallace Broecker, of Columbia University, was piecing together the paleoclimatic flip-flops with the salt-circulation story and warning that small nudges to our climate might produce "unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse.

The Sheet In 3 Sheets To The Wind Crossword Puzzle

That might result in less evaporation, creating lower-than-normal levels of greenhouse gases and thus a global cooling. Water falling as snow on Greenland carries an isotopic "fingerprint" of what the temperature was like en route. We could go back to ice-age temperatures within a decade—and judging from recent discoveries, an abrupt cooling could be triggered by our current global-warming trend. Salt circulates, because evaporation up north causes it to sink and be carried south by deep currents. There is, increasingly, international cooperation in response to catastrophe—but no country is going to be able to rely on a stored agricultural surplus for even a year, and any country will be reluctant to give away part of its surplus.

It's happening right now:a North Atlantic Oscillation started in 1996. Another sat on Hudson's Bay, and reached as far west as the foothills of the Rocky Mountains—where it pushed, head to head, against ice coming down from the Rockies. Implementing it might cost no more, in relative terms, than building a medieval cathedral. The last warm period abruptly terminated 13, 000 years after the abrupt warming that initiated it, and we've already gone 15, 000 years from a similar starting point. These blobs, pushed down by annual repetitions of these late-winter events, flow south, down near the bottom of the Atlantic. In discussing the ice ages there is a tendency to think of warm as good—and therefore of warming as better. To keep a bistable system firmly in one state or the other, it should be kept away from the transition threshold. Out of the sea of undulating white clouds mountain peaks stick up like islands. There is another part of the world with the same good soil, within the same latitudinal band, which we can use for a quick comparison. We need more well-trained people, bigger computers, more coring of the ocean floor and silted-up lakes, more ships to drag instrument packages through the depths, more instrumented buoys to study critical sites in detail, more satellites measuring regional variations in the sea surface, and perhaps some small-scale trial runs of interventions. Natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes are less troubling than abrupt coolings for two reasons: they're short (the recovery period starts the next day) and they're local or regional (unaffected citizens can help the overwhelmed). All we would need to do is open a channel through the ice dam with explosives before dangerous levels of water built up. We might undertake to regulate the Mediterranean's salty outflow, which is also thought to disrupt the North Atlantic Current. Sudden onset, sudden recovery—this is why I use the word "flip-flop" to describe these climate changes.

Huge amounts of seawater sink at known downwelling sites every winter, with the water heading south when it reaches the bottom. The Mediterranean waters flowing out of the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic Ocean are about 10 percent saltier than the ocean's average, and so they sink into the depths of the Atlantic. Man-made global warming is likely to achieve exactly the opposite—warming Greenland and cooling the Greenland Sea.