Scientists warn AMOC collapse risk growing as monitoring funding falters

Penny Holliday, chief scientific officer of the National Oceanography Centre, and colleagues Femke de Jong and Sjoerd Groeskamp, both senior scientists at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), published their warning in a Guardian opinion piece Sunday.

The AMOC is a vast system of ocean currents that moves heat from the Southern Hemisphere toward the North Atlantic, playing a crucial role in regulating global climate. The scientists said that under current climate change, the AMOC is projected to weaken enough to radically change weather patterns and cause sea level rise across Europe. They wrote that there is “little consensus on when and how fast this will occur,” and that progress in modeling is hampered by “insufficient understanding of the physics of the Amoc.”

Systematic monitoring of the current began only two decades ago, the authors noted, when researchers in several countries patched together individual nationally funded research projects. Those measurements have become a benchmark for climate models and “critically improved our understanding of the Amoc,” they said.

But funding for several AMOC monitoring initiatives is now at risk. “Several Amoc monitoring initiatives are at a risk of being defunded and could be discontinued at any moment,” the scientists wrote. They pointed to the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts to NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation, which they estimated provide about 50% of the total AMOC monitoring budget. Last week, the U.S. announced the descoping of the Ocean Observing Initiative, which was part of an AMOC observation program.

The European Union’s OceanEye initiative, launched recently, has allocated €50m for ocean observations. However, the scientists warned that before OceanEye is operational, the research vessels that service present-day observing systems must be financed, planned, and packed.

“Considering that current climate change is already hard to keep up with as a society, we can’t begin to imagine what impact an Amoc collapse could have on our daily lives,” they wrote.

The total price tag for all AMOC monitoring, according to the scientists, adds up to about €25m a year. By comparison, Europe spends roughly €1bn annually monitoring space for asteroids — a risk they described as close to zero. “For five cents per person per year, the EU can maintain one of the world’s most important climate monitoring systems,” they wrote.

The scientists urged the EU, the United Kingdom, and other international partners to “step up, make haste, get organised and collaborate” to assure the long-term continuation of AMOC monitoring. They said an AMOC collapse “may be imminent, a century away, or, if we act boldly to limit climate change, it might be averted altogether.”

The call comes amid a series of scientific studies narrowing the range of possible climate warming futures. As MSI has reported, scientists have revised projections to exclude both the worst and best-case warming scenarios, and the U.N. has said there is a 75% chance global warming will breach the 1.5°C threshold within the next five years.