As Europe has been hit by its most severe heat wave on record, scientists are pointing to an unlikely accomplice: a patch of unusually cold water in the North Atlantic.
The region has been baking in temperatures in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with France having the hottest temperatures on record, hundreds of schools in the UK closed and more than a thousand heat-related deaths recorded.
In contrast, however, just a few hundred kilometers away to the west, between Greenland and Ireland, there is a strange blue patch that shows that temperatures are actually falling as the rest of the world warms.
Scientists believe that the European heat crisis is being exacerbated by the “cold blob”.
Dubbed the “cold blob”, this phenomenon may even exacerbate Europe’s heat wave problem rather than offer a solution.
Scientists elaborate on how the melting ice from Greenland ends up dumping fresh water into the oceans and thus disrupting the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is a key current that moves warm water from the tropics northward.
According to the studies, the blob has cooled by up to 0.9 degrees Celsius since 1900, even as the global sea surface temperature rose by 1 degree.
Scientists now give a 50% chance of an AMOC shutdown this century, which could have serious consequences such as even harsher European weather, droughts in Asia and Africa, and rising sea levels.
