Should we be worried about the Gulf Stream?

Audio 48:30

Storm in Brittany © iStock

By: Simon Rozé Follow

50 mins

It is invisible, but it is nevertheless one of the essential cogs of the climate machine.

In the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, diving to meet the Gulf Stream, the most famous sea current but still unknown whose moods never cease to worry us. 

Publicity

Should we be worried about the Gulf Stream?

This is the refrain that we have been hearing for a few weeks, following a study published

in the journal Nature Geoscience

.

It is rather, in this case of what one calls the AMOC ... the great Atlantic circulation which connects the oceans of South Africa to Scandinavia: it would be, one reads, at its most low level for 1000 years.

What does it mean ?

What is it really?

Should we be worried? 

with 

Didier 

Swingedouw

, CNRS researcher, he works at the Oceanic and Continental Environments and Paleoenvironments Laboratory (EPOC), in Bordeaux

Jean-Baptiste 

Sallée

, oceanographer and climatologist 

at the LOCEAN Oceanography and Climate Laboratory.

Newsletter

Receive all international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

google-play-badge_FR

  • Research

  • Weather

  • Oceans

  • Climate change

On the same subject

Around the question

How did we invent the continents and the oceans?

It's not windy

Climate: the colossal impact of global warming on the ocean

Weather

Oceans and climate change: Africa's “triple punishment”