A newly discovered deep, cold current flowing off Iceland's coast may reveal that the North Atlantic is less sensitive to climate change than previously thought, researchers reported on Sunday. The new current, the North Icelandic Jet, feeds the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a giant pattern known as the "great ocean conveyor belt," or by the disconcerting acronym AMOC, Reuters reported. Because this pattern is critically important for regulating Earth's climate, including European and North American climates, any strong influences on it, and their response to a warming Earth, are of keen scientific and practical interest. The "conveyor belt" current, introduced to movie-goers in the Al Gore environmental film "An Inconvenient Truth," carries warm surface water from the tropical Atlantic toward the Arctic. In the process, the water warms the air in high latitudes, then cools, sinks and returns toward the equator, flowing as a deep stream at lower ocean depths. Climate specialists reckoned that most of the cold water that made up that deep south-flowing stream came from off the Greenland coast and was made up of fresh glacier-melt water, produced by new warmth in glacier-covered Greenland. Because fresh water freezes at a higher temperature than salt water, these specialists suggested that this fresh water from glaciers and other warming-related phenomena would get into the North Atlantic, where it could freeze and prevent the water from sinking to make up the bottom of the conveyor belt. -- SPA
