The climate threat|Global challenge

Study: Atlantic currents could collapse within years

An important system of water currents in the Atlantic, called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), may collapse already in the 2030s due to human climate influence. This is shown by a new study that used innovative calculation models, writes CNN.

- It is very worrying, says co-author René van Westen, ocean and atmospheric scientist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

According to the study, Amoc is believed to collapse between 2037 and 2064. It would render parts of the world unrecognizable – temperatures would drop drastically in Europe and North America, and within 100 years the Arctic ice would have crawled down to southern England. In the Amazon, the rainy and dry seasons would switch places.

The Amoc is a circulation that brings warm surface water from the South Atlantic north, where cooler, higher salinity water in turn sinks and flows south.

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Scientists Propose Doomsday Vaults on Moon

An international research group has presented a radical idea in the journal BioScience, to build a kind of doomsday vault on the moon. This is reported by The Guardian and several other media.

There, biological samples could be saved in order to eventually clone or create new individuals. The threat from, among other things, climate change, war and natural disasters shows the importance of a biobank, say the researchers.

The idea is not new. Already today, there is Svalbard's global seed vault, a gene bank for plants. But with increasingly warmer temperatures, there is a risk that Svalbard will not remain safe enough to store samples.

The moon's naturally cold environment, on the other hand, would make it possible to keep the samples frozen all year round without human intervention.