A European Ice Age is Coming Sooner Than We Thought...

Ajouté : 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Europe is probably a lot further north than you think it is. There's sort of a popular misconception that Europe and North America are roughly at the same latitude, but this couldn't be further from the truth in reality. If you place North American cities in Europe at the same latitude, you'd find that cities like Denver, Chicago, Detroit, and New York would roughly line up with Italy, while very cold cities like Calgary, and Edmonton would be between Germany and Britain. Meanwhile, if you did the reverse and placed European cities in North America at the same latitude, you find cities like Budapest, Munich, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Dublin in Canada, and then cities like Helsinki, Oslo, Tronheim, and Reankuik way up in the deep north of Canada. For its latitude this far up north, the European continent's climate is dramatically more mild than would be initially expected compared with North America. But that may be starting to change. You see, one of the primary reasons why Europe is warmer today than it should be is thanks to the primary system of ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean that is called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation or the Amo or the AOK for short. The sheer scale of the AOK is almost incomprehensible for a human to fully grasp, but it essentially functions as a gigantic conveyor belt that moves warm and cold water throughout the Atlantic Ocean that is driven by differences in seawater density, which itself is influenced by temperature and salinity levels. The AOK is only part of a broader worldwide system of ocean currents that moves heat across the globe. But for our purposes explaining why Europe is warmer than it otherwise should be, we're really only going to focus on the AO part of the system within the Atlantic. The Amos is fueled by the formation of deep water in the high latitudes of the North Atlantic near Greenland. Here, warmer surface waters are cooled down by the atmosphere. As the water here evaporates and forms sea ice, more salt is also left behind in the ocean. Cold water is more dense than warm water and salty water is more dense than fresh water.

[00:02:00]which means the colder, saltier water is a lot more dense than warmer, less salty water is. As a result, the colder and saltier water up here sinks and then travel south along the bottom of the ocean thousands of meters beneath the surface all the way to the South Atlantic near to the Antarctic. Once here, the powerful prevailing winds that originate from the west help pull this deep, cold water back up to the surface again in a process known as upwelling.

[00:02:28]This water is then carried back along the surface again northwest all the way to the Gulf of Mexico in the tropics where they heat back up and then merge with the Gulf Stream. The powerful prevailing winds that blow west to east towards Europe. This then carries the warm tropical surface waters northeast across the Atlantic Ocean towards northwestern Europe where they help to moderate the climate around Britain and Ireland, Northern France and Scandinavia. Along the way, this warmer surface water steadily collects more salt thanks to evaporation and an influx of saltier waters from the Mediterranean Sea. And once these waters reach the Arctic, they start getting colder again too in sync, completing the whole loop around the Atlantic and starting the whole cycle over again. This whole system is frequently referred to as a sort of global conveyor belt that transports warmth to Europe and coal to Antarctica. And it operates on a very long time scale. In order to make just one complete journey along the entire loop, it'll take a single molecule of water hundreds to even thousands of years. And in addition to moving heat and cold around the Atlantic and influencing climates, the Amok also carries nutrients around the ocean that supports marine life just about everywhere, too. Without the warmer surface waters pulled from the Gulf of Mexico by the AOK, northwest Europe would be just as naturally frigid as comparable latitudes are in Canada like Labrador, Quebec, and none of it. And unfortunately, this seems to be the future that we might actually be heading towards because multiple scientists are currently sounding the alarm that the AOK could be collapsing as a result of climate change. And as a result, Europe might strangely become the only part of the world that actually cools down in the era of climate change. And by cool down, I mean potentially go through a modern ice age era. You might be familiar with this as a loose plot point from the 2004 disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, in which the disruption of the AOK leads to a cataclysmic clin shift that rapidly transitions the Earth into a new ice age in only a matter of days, forcing glacial ice sheets to almost immediately expand south and envelop cities like New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo before they can be adequately evacuated. This catastrophic worldwide freezing scenario is very implausible to say the least, but it is at least partially based in a realworld fear of what actually will happen if the AOK collapses. And there are plenty of signs that that part of the story is actually starting to happen. As the world in general increasingly warms up because of climate change, the pace of melting across the Greenland ice sheet continues accelerating, which is adding more and more fresh water into the North Atlantic and diluting the oceans's nearby salinity levels at the same time as sea level temperatures are also generally increasing. The result is that the waters around Greenland are getting less salty and warmer, which is making the water less dense and less capable of sinking, which is starting to prevent the formation of the cold, salty, deep water current of the AOCH that flows from the Arctic down to the Antarctic with cascading consequences further along the loop. In other words, the faster that the Greenland ice sheet melts, the faster the AO gets disrupted.

[00:05:42]The whole strength of the current begins to slow down with a less amount of cold salty water that's sinking in the Arctic, which causes the AOF strength pulling warm water from the Gulf of Mexico towards Europe that picks up more salt along the way to weaken as well, which causes the North Atlantic to continue becoming more diluted with less salt inputs, which exacerbates the problem in a dangerous feedback loop that keeps making the water less and less capable of actually sinking. At the same time, as the air in the North Atlantic gets warmer with climate change, the water in the ocean loses more of its ability to transfer its heat at the surface in sink, which is only further breaking down the AOK.

[00:06:22]Eventually, there's an unclear tipping point in this feedback loop that can be reached where the AOK won't be capable of recovering for a minimum of centuries, no matter what humans do.

[00:06:32]Even if we manage to completely reverse the pace of climate change and radically reduce our emissions because of how slowm moving the entire system is because it takes water as much as a thousand years or longer to get transported around the entire loop of the AOK. Once it gets shut down, it'll take at least that long to get it all restarted again. which means that if it reaches its tipping point and then shuts down, the world and humanity will have to deal with the myriad consequences for many centuries to come. Climate and oceanic scientists have been warning about the possibility of the AOK to weaken or collapse for decades now, at least since the 1960s. Back then, however, there was little concrete data on this as a possibility beyond mere inference, and it was long regarded as a minuscule possibility. But since then, researchers have developed a complex oceans spanning system to actually monitor and track what's happening to the AOCH. A part of the system is the rapid array that was launched in 2004 in a collaboration between the UK's National Environment Research Council and America's National Science Foundation in Noah. Roughly spanning the entire North Atlantic between the Bahamas in the west and the Canary Islands in the east. The Rapid Array consists of 24 subsurface moorings with sensors that are bolted to wire stretching all the way down to the ocean floor. Rapid collects multiple measurements across the North Atlantic from the strength of currents to temperatures and pressure and more and has been continually collecting these measurements for more than 22 years now since it was launched in 2004. Rapid is the largest system that's keeping track of the AMO, but there's others that collect their own measurements with similar technology, too, like ONAP between Canada and the UK and SAMA between South America and South Africa.

[00:08:15]And the data that we've been receiving from these systems of what's happening to the AOK is certainly troubling.

[00:08:21]Generally, the strength of the AOK's ability to transport water around the Atlantic is measured in units of 1 million cubic meters of water per second, which is also called a spur drop. One sphere drop equals 1 million cubic meters of water per second. Now, roughly to date, this is all of the data that the rapid array has collected since it was launched in 2004 with years along the x-axis and spur drop values along the yaxis. The solid curvy line that you're seeing is the average measured strength of the AOX since 2004. While the straighter dashed line running down the center is the observed trend line, which as you can see has been declining.

[00:08:59]But in a more concrete terms, the observed strength of the AOK has declined from between 18 to 19 sphere drops between 2004 and 2008 to about 15 to 17 spare drops between 2011 and 2020.

[00:09:13]While a paper published in geohysical research letters in 2025 that went over this data suggested that since 2004, the AOK has been gradually weakening by about one spare drop per decade on average. The big fear is that if the AOCH eventually begins reaching six spare drops of flow or less from its current 15 to 17, it'll begin entering into its shutdown phase. The big questions are how much more will the AOCH slow down by? When or if this slowdown will eventually hit the tipping point of no return? Is human-driven climate change actually driving the slowdown? And how bad will the consequences be? And frustratingly, there are a massive amount of scientific opinions in all of these questions that suggest radically different things.

[00:09:59]First of all, it's important to clarify that researchers aren't actually capable yet of deducing whether or not human-driven climate change through greenhouse gas emissions is really influencing the AMO or whether its downward trend since 2004 is part of a natural eb and flow cycle instead.

[00:10:16]Having only been running since 2004, 22 years of data collected by the rapid array on the AMO is simply not enough to determine whether or not climate change is affecting this decline. Researchers estimate that they will need at least 29 years worth of data to come to a conclusion on that specific question.

[00:10:34]Meaning that we won't really confidently know until at least 2033. Understanding the possible downward trend in the AOK is further complicated by the only peacemeal evidence we have of its fluctuations before 2004. But we do know that it's at least possible for the AOCH to collapse. Because we do know that it's happened before. Around the end of the last ice age around 12,000 years ago, the melting ice sheets that once spanned across North America and Europe dumped a huge amount of fresh water into the North Atlantic, which diluted the ocean's water and affected its density and shut down the AOCH in a similar way as is presently being feared with the Greenland ice sheets melting rate. The end result of this was massive cooling across North America and Europe with average temperatures in North America dropping by around 3° C, in Europe by 5° C, and in Greenland by 10° C. While the Southern Hemisphere simultaneously experienced significant warming, changes that took place rapidly in geological time over the span of just a few decades rather than the days portrayed in the day after tomorrow. This period of the Earth's history is known as the Younger Dryas and lasted for around a thousand years before the Amokch began restarting again and returning the warmer temperatures back to Europe. Whether or not this is going to happen again in our own near-term future is a matter of tremendous scientific debate right now, but there are already some warning signs that the Amok is entering into a slowing down phase again. Besides for the measurements that have been taken by the Rapid Array, chief among these warning signs are the sea surface temperatures being measured in the North Atlantic.

[00:12:13]This cool blob of the ocean that's been measured just off the coast of Greenland is the only part of the world's oceans that has been actively cooling down since the industrial revolution. the precise location where the melting Greenland ice sheet would be dumping fresh water and diluting local salinity, which would be the first step of the Amoth potentially slowing down and shutting off, which would start cooling down the waters here. The existence of this cold blob of the ocean by Greenland, a true anomaly worldwide, has been cited as further evidence that the AOK is beginning to break down again.

[00:12:48]But precisely how much more it might break down in the future is still heavily uncertain and debated. The most recent assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC, which dates from 2021, stated that while it was confident the AOCH will decline over the rest of the 21st century, it maintained a medium confidence level that it will not collapse outright before 2100. Instead, the IPCC's most recent report concluded that the AOP will most likely weaken by between 24% and 39% by 2100, depending on whether or not the planet is in a low emissions or high emissions scenario.

[00:13:26]However, there is a very large amount of scientific research that has concluded that the models used by the IPCC lean towards unrealistic levels of stability for the AMO and are overly optimistic.

[00:13:37]There are a lot of underappreciated difficulties in creating computing models of the AMO because they have to model out very difficult things to know like ice melt, precipitation, and cloud cover among other factors. There are a lot of criticisms for the IPCC AOCH model specifically. But the biggest one is that they so far haven't incorporated the impact of huge volumes of fresh water being dumped into the North Atlantic by the melting Greenland ice sheet. because doing so dramatically increases the computational power required to run the simulations beyond the absurd levels they're already being run at. And thus there is a lot of scientific literature out there that argues the IPCC has been consistently underestimating the real danger of an AOT collapse. One paper published in nature in 2023 which analyzed sea surface temperatures around the Greenland cold blob by brother and sister team Peter and Suzanne Ditliffen affiliated with the Neils Boore Institute in Copenhagen argued that if global emissions continue to increase a collapse in the AMO might take place sometime between 2037 and 21109. But at the same time, other studies published in Nature, like this one in 2025 by researchers affiliated with the UK's Met Office in the University of Exat, backs the IPCC's latest conclusion that an AOK collapse prior to 2100 is unlikely.

[00:15:00]Another problem with most models and studies into the AMO is that historically most of them terminate in the year 2100 because running them any further beyond that again dramatically raises the computational power that's required. Stefan Ramstoorf, a physical oceanographer affiliated with the Potsum Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and one of the world's leading experts on the AOCH, has analyzed the handful of models that have been run out to 2300 or later. From this data, he has reported that the chances of an AMO collapse under a high emissions scenario rises to a whopping 70%. with the collapse most often taking place in the early 2200s, roughly two centuries from now. Romorf has been studying the AOK for more than 35 years. And as recently as this month, he stated that for the first 30 years or so, he believed the odds of the AOK actually collapsing were minuscule at only about a 5% chance of happening, along with the rest of the mainstream scientific community. But now, armed with greater evidence, he believes it's going to be about a 50/50 chance, and some governments are already starting to take the risk seriously. In November of 2025, Iceland became the first government to designate the risk of an AMO shutdown as a national security threat, and more governments in northwestern Europe that stand to lose the most are likely to follow. And then very recently in April of 2026, the most alarming paper on the future of the AOK to date was published in the journal Science by researchers affiliated with the University of Bordeaux in France.

[00:16:35]Their model, which incorporated realworld Atlantic Ocean temperature and salinity data, concluded that the strength of the AOK could weaken by 50% from pre-industrial levels by the end of this century in 2100. That's not enough to shut the AOTH down by the end of this century, but it would very likely put the AOTH past its tipping point of no recovery, meaning that it would likely continue weakening into a full-on collapse scenario sometime early in the 2100s. And if that happens, here are just some of the many projected consequences. Without the Amoth bringing warm waters to Europe that'll moderate the climate anymore, northwestern Europe will most likely grow dramatically colder during the winter. Even if the global temperature increases by 2° C because of greenhouse gas emissions, it still won't be capable of offsetting the larger loss of heat in Europe that'll happen with the collapse of the AOK.

[00:17:30]During the winter, the extent of sea ice across northwestern Europe will expand dramatically from today without the infusion of warm tropical waters from the tropics. In February, the peak reach of sea ice will expand throughout the Baltic Sea and nearly the entire North Sea, stretching down as far south as Lincolnshire in Great Britain and the northern shores of the Netherlands and completely enveloping both Denmark and Scotland. Scandinavia and Iceland will be practically fully encapsulated by sea ice during the winter. While in North America, the sea ice coverage will extend down as far south as New Finland.

[00:18:06]In order to keep conducting maritime trade through the winter, the Scandinavian and Baltic countries along with Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany would all need to invest in a much larger icebreaker fleet. This dramatic expansion of sea ice coverage in the winter would also then reflect more sunlight and serve to reduce the local temperatures even further. Winters across northwestern Europe would grow much harsher than they are today.

[00:18:30]London's average winter temperature would drop by 2° C from today and would experience once in 10year cold extremes of as much as -20 C while Edinburgh further north could experience extremes of as much as -30 C. Scandinavia, meanwhile, will basically be plunged into an ice age every winter. The average winter temperature in Oslo, Norway's capital, would be projected to drop by nearly 15° C from today, and it could experience cold extremes as bad as -48° C. Scandinavia's climate will more resemble Siberia's under this scenario.

[00:19:07]And all of this will mean dramatically more usage of energy throughout the winter for heating and critical strains on existing infrastructure that isn't designed to handle these kinds of cold extremes. Precipitation levels across northwestern Europe would dry out and the region would also grow much more aid than it is today as well. Worse, the ability for farmers to conduct rainfed arable agriculture across the UK and Ireland would effectively become impossible under the scenario too. And so the agricultural outputs of both the UK and Ireland would most likely collapse. Weirder, the loss of the AOK probably wouldn't cause northwestern Europe to cool down very much in the summer. Summer temperatures would likely remain about the same as they are today, which means that there will be some truly wild temperature swings on the continent between the winter and summer seasons that will again somewhat resemble what happens in Siberia.

[00:19:59]Southern Europe, meanwhile, which is less influenced by the AOCH, would grow warmer along with the rest of the world and would experience increasing rates of drought from the loss of precipitation.

[00:20:09]While the average year round temperature difference between northern and southern Europe would climb up by a whopping 4° C from where they are today, meaning that storms across the European continent will almost certainly grow stronger in intensity. Most of the analysis and of the consequences of an AOCH collapse focus on Europe because that's where most of the funding into Amoth research has come from. And it's also one of the places that'll be the most negatively affected by it. But that doesn't mean that other places won't be negatively affected as well. While northwestern Europe will grow colder with the loss of warm water, Antarctica will grow warmer with the loss of colder water to the point where temperatures in Antarctica could rise by an astonishing 6° C, which could rapidly accelerate the melting rate of Antarctic ice and contribute further to greater sea level rises. And without the current pulling huge volumes of water from the US East Coast towards Europe, sea levels would likely rise swiftly along the US East Coast as well.

[00:21:06]The rainy and dry seasons in the Amazon region of South America might flip and the tropical rain belt will shift south, which will increase drought in the Sahel region of Africa and weaken the monsoon season in Asia. While it won't be as rapid or as catastrophic as the events portrayed in the day after tomorrow, the consequences of an AMO collapse are still bad enough to be taken deadly serious by world governments. And even if it doesn't outright collapse within our own lifetimes by the end of this century, it weakening in our lifetimes will still generate some level of these negative consequences. While we could be pushing the AOC past its tipping point toward an inevitable collapse next century that the next 1,000 years of human generations will have to deal with. And what do you think they'll have to say about us for having potentially caused that? And on another note, what do you think you'd have to say to your prior self for having signed up for a bunch of subscriptions that are still costing you money today? We all subscribe to things that charge us a little bit of money every month. Now, usually not enough for us to pay attention to it, but enough to add up over time. There's a lot of companies out there whose entire business model is just hoping that you'll sign up for something and then forget you ever did so that they can just keep charging you month after month. It's extremely annoying and also really hard to keep track of. But luckily, there's a solution. Rocket Money, the sponsor of this video. You link Rocket Money access to your bank and credit card accounts, and it fishes out all of the recurring subscriptions that you're paying for, lets you see them all clearly in one place, and then enables you to easily cancel the ones you no longer want to keep going. When I did this, I found out that I'd been subscribed to tons and tons of small local newspapers that I had signed up for once in order to read an important story for a video I was producing that I had then immediately forgotten about. I never read anything from these subscriptions ever again, but they were still charging me like $3 a month anyway. And I never noticed because monthtomonth it was never enough to make me notice. But they kept on adding up over time. And Rocket Money finally enabled me to see all of this in one place. It was so easy. And it also saved me the time of having to go through the cumbersome process of trying to individually cancel all of these subscriptions I didn't need. And there's a lot more than just the recurring payments feature that I found to be worthwhile. They'll also help you negotiate your bills to be lower. For example, a lot of us are paying too much for our internet. Rockin Money often knows this and they know how to get your number down if it's possible. They'll also analyze your finances and pull out trends and insights that it sees within your spending habits, which makes it super simple for you to see where you're spending too much money. They can also help you reach your goals as you can set a budget and then use the app to track your progress sticking to it through time. So, if you want to take control of your finances and save some money, you can try this out for free by going to my link down below in the description or by scanning the QR code here on your screen. And you can unlock even more features with their premium option. It's also a great way to help support my own channel at the same time. And as always, thank you so much for watching.