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What if Jack Hall might have been right after all and what happens if we, one day, discover that the Day-after-Tomorrow myth might not be so farfetched after all? Researchers from the Department of Ocean and Earth Science at Southampton come to back up the movie with some theories of their own.
Maybe they don’t have a genuine Jack Hall to stand up for their theories but they do have some very interesting explanations to what can happen in a not-so-distant future. In the movie, Dennis Quaid explained that the thermohaline conveyor (the real name is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC for short) collapsed due to a sudden climate shift.
This led to the formation of tornadoes that razed the city of New York to the ground and of great floods that engulfed the northern hemisphere. Ruling out the dramatic outcome of this event, Professor Sybren Drijfhout tells us that the AMOC will not shut down, although it will decrease by 30 or 50 percent each year.
Also Sybren Drijfhout that if the event would follow its course as it did in the movie, Earth’s temperature will not drop immediately by 12 degrees. It’s a rather intricate and time consuming event. If this were to happen, it will take Earth at least 40 years to recover from AMOC’s collapse and the rising tide will not hit New York city but rather the North Atlantic area, including the British Isles.
Recently Sybren Drijfhout has been in charge of conducting a series of experiments regarding the scenario in which global warming and the total collapse of AMOC occur at the same time. If this happens, Drijfhout explains that over a period of 20 years Earth’s temperature will drop considerably.
Although he ruled out the possibility of AMOC’s shutdown, the professor warns us that even though the outcome of these events may not be so catastrophic as depicted in the movies, it could lead the world into a Little Ice Age.
The little Ice Age is depicted in scientific literature as being a period of cooling that took place in the Middle Ages, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This little Ice Age came after the Medieval Warm Period. Scientist trace its cause to cyclical lows in solar radiation absorption, increasing volcanic activity and variability in overall global climate.
Drijfhout studied the AMOC used the AMOC-Rapid array assembly and stated that even though he observed some ups and downs in AMOC’s strength, this cannot be construed as evidence for a global catastrophe.
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