Where the infamous Atlantic Ocean conveyor belt is concerned — inspiration for at least one climate-change thriller that brought 100-foot-deep snowdrifts over America’s East Coast and Dennis Quaid to the rescue — it’s still the “Day Before.”
A team of scientists have installed a series of mooring buoys and have actually begun to measure how the current shifts and changes over the year. And it’s still too soon to know what changes in the flow mean.
Oceanographers Stuart Cunningham and Torsten Kanzow supervised an international project to sink a string of moorings and then collect data for analysis. The scientists work for the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, Great Britain.
“The scientists captured the fickle flow of Atlantic currents by comparing what the moorings’ current meters revealed with measurements of the streams’ effects on an unused telephone wire stretching between Florida and the Bahamas as well as satellite measurements of surface winds,” according to an online story in Scientific American.