The world continues to warm up at unsustainable rhythms, and the oceans in particular are meeting a constant increase in average temperatures, so much so that according to NASA the 90% of global warming takes place in oceanic waters.
However, there is an exception, an area of Atlantic that goes from Greenland to Ireland. It’s called North Atlantic Warming Hole, a name that can cause confusion, the “heating hole” of the North Atlantic, known even more simply as “cold blob”. This area is colder of those surrounding, and stands continuing to cool downas shown by a study published on Journal of Climate.
What is cold Blob? In the image above, developed by NASA in 2015, you can clearly see where the cold Blob is located, and why have this name: it is an area of the Atlantic with significantly lower temperatures than the surrounding ones. His presence could be connected to the dissolution of the Greenland glacial capwhich enters the Atlantic huge quantities of cold and sweet water; this cannot “sink” but remains on the surface because the underlying water is more saline and therefore denser, determining thethermal anomaly.
What will happen? The team of the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, has therefore built two IT models to predict what will happen in the next decades to the cold Blob: one of the two models took into consideration the way in which the changes in the circulation of air in the atmosphere (therefore in the winds) affect the ocean circulation; the other does not. Both models are based on historical data and on a global scenario in which emissions still rise, but in a moderate way.
increasingly cold. The model that also took into account the wind has demonstrated an interesting thing: around 2040, the local winds will have weakened enough to not be able to “stress” the ocean effectively, thus further reducing the temperatures. This cooling periodalways according to the model, should last Until about 2070.
Thermal anomaly. But what are the consequences of this anomaly? Potentially devastating: the cold Blob could have a Remarkable impact on rains and rainfall throughout Europein addition to having effects on oceanic circulation that could feel all over the world. The conclusion of the study is a warning: if we want to know what the climate will be like in the next decades, we cannot underestimate The importance of the winds.
