- The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, delivers warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to Europe, stabilizing its climate.
- Increasing rainfall and glacial meltwater could seriously disrupt the current, which has been slowing down for the past 150 years.
- Not all of the effects of an AMOC shutdown are clear, but it is likely that Europe will begin to see far colder winters should the current cease.
Despite its frequent rain and cloudy skies, the weather in London rarely dips into the truly miserable. In the wintertime, London is, at its coldest, only 5°C (41°F). During the summertime, it doesn't typically get much hotter than 23°C (74.5°F). Yet, if we were to travel westward, we'd arrive in the far chillier Newfoundland.
The reason why London enjoys such regular temperatures while Canadian cities that are equally as far north are forced to shiver in the cold has to do with ocean currents—specifically, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. The portion of AMOC that most are probably familiar with is called the Gulf Stream, or the North Atlantic Current.
This massive current transports warm water from the Gulf of Mexico towards Europe, stabilizing much of northwestern Europe's climate.
"The oceans store an immense amount of energy and the ocean currents have a strong effect on the Earth's climate," said University of Groningen mathematician Fred Wubs in a statement.
However, human-driven changes to the climate are changing how oceans store energy. Correspondingly, this could change how AMOC functions. Modeling the impact of meltwater from Greenland and excessive rainfall, Wubs and his colleagues discovered that this current could temporarily halt within the 100 years, significantly impacting Europe's weather in the process.
More ice-skating on the Thames
A topographic map of a portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation depicting the circulation of surface currents (solid curves) and deep currents (dashed curves). Colors of curves indicate approximate temperatures.
R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/Science/USGCRP
The AMOC has been weakening for the past 150 years and is currently at its weakest point of the past 1,500 years. This has spurred researchers to assess the current's future. Concerns over a complete failure of the AMOC inspired the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow — although the events that took place in that film are clearly hyperbole.
Wubs and colleagues calculated that the possibility of a temporary shutdown of AMOC stood at 15 percent over the next 100 years, a one-in-six chance. Fortunately, however, the same model predicted that there was virtually no chance of a complete shutdown over the next 1,000 years.
For North America and Europe, this would mean colder winters, as well as hotter summers in Europe. More worryingly, this would also reduce the ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide, exacerbating the effects of climate change.
The AMOC has fluctuated over Earth's history, and when it has slowed down stopped in the past, massive cooling events typically followed. For instance, an AMOC slowdown has been implicated in the rise of the Little Ice Age, a period between 1200 and 1850 when temperatures in Europe dipped by about 1°C. Some researchers suggest that the Younger Dryas, an abrupt cooling period that took place between 12,900 and 11,7000 BP, occurred in part due to a change in AMOC, dropping the Earth's climate by 2 to 6°C in a matter of decades.
While the exact impacts of a temporary shutdown, especially under modern climate conditions, aren't entirely clear, such a shutdown would definitely spell colder winters for Europe. "Previous studies have shown that a shutdown of the AMOC would considerably affect the climate of the North Atlantic, and, more in general, of the Northern Hemisphere: the temperatures may drop by a few degrees, depending on the location," co-author Daniele Castellana told Newsweek. Their findings "strongly depend on the background state of the climate," he added.
It's important to note that even though an AMOC slowdown or shutdown will cool much of the northern hemisphere, higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will still result in higher global temperatures over the long term. In fact, one study even suggested that an AMOC shutdown could result in extremely rapid increases in global temperatures, since the churning ocean current would be less able to store heat in the deep ocean, releasing it onto the surface instead.
If anything, recent findings into the AMOC's role in the global climate underscore just how large and complicated the Earth's systems really are. The AMOC has only been continuously monitored since 2004, so more research is needed before we can definitively say what is happening to it and what a temporary shutdown would mean for the rest of the world.
This is going to force a major shift in the way we see these early hominids. Researchers had thought that Neanderthals were profoundly primitive, and just barely human. This cave in France's Aveyron Valley changes all that: It's suddenly obvious that Neanderthals were not quite so unlike us.
According to The Atlantic, Bruniquel Cave was first explored in 1990 by Bruno Kowalsczewski, who was 15 at the time. He'd spent three years digging away at rubble covering a space through which his father felt air moving.
Some members of a local caving club managed to squeeze through the narrow, 30-meter long tunnel Kowalsczewski had dug to arrive in a passageway. They followed it past pools of water and old animal bones for over 330 meters before coming into a large chamber and a scene they had no reason to expect: Stalagmites that someone had broken into hundreds of small pieces, most of which were arranged into two rings—one roughly 6 meters across, and one 2 meters wide—with the remaining pieces stacked into one of four piles or leaning against the rings. There were also indications of fires and burnt bones.
Image source: Etienne FABRE - SSAC
What the?
A professional archeologist, Francois Rouzaud, determined with carbon dating that a burnt bear bone found in the chamber was 47,600 years old, which made the stalagmite structures older than any known cave painting. It also put the cave squarely within the age of the Neanderthals since they were the only humans in France that early. No one had suspected them of being capable of constructing complex forms or doing anything that far underground.
After Rouzard suddenly died in 1999, exploration at the cave stopped until life-long caver Sophie Verheyden, vacationing in the area, heard about it and decided to try and uranium-date the stalagmites inside.
The team she assembled eventually determined that the stalagmites had been broken up by people 176,000 years ago, way farther back even than Rouzard had supposed.
There weren't any signs that Neanderthals lived in the cave, so it's a mystery what they were up to down there. Verheyden thinks it's unlikely that a solitary artist created the tableaux, and so an organized group of skilled workers must've been involved. And “When you see such a structure so far into the cave, you think of something cultural or religious, but that's not proven," Verheyden told The Atlantic.
Whatever they built, the Bruniquel Cave reveals some big surprises about Neanderthals: They had fire, they built things, and likely used tools. Add this to recent discoveries that suggest they buried their dead, made art, and maybe even had language, and these mysterious proto-humans start looking a lot more familiar. A lot more like homo sapiens, and a lot more like distant cousins lost to history.
Paul Hudson/Flickr
Obscure freaky smiling psycho man
When considering what precisely makes someone a psychopath, the lines can be blurry.
Psychological research has shown that many people in society have some degree of malevolent personality traits, such as those described by the "dark triad": narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and deceit), and psychopathy (callousness and cynicism). But while people who score high in these traits are more likely to end up in prison, most of them are well functioning and don't engage in extreme antisocial behaviors.
Now, a new study published in Cerebral Cortex found that the brains of psychopathic criminals are structurally and functionally similar to many well-functioning, non-criminal individuals with psychopathic traits. The results suggest that psychopathy isn't a binary classification, but rather a "constellation" of personality traits that "vary in the non-incarcerated population with normal range of social functioning."
Assessing your inner psychopath
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the brains of violent psychopathic criminals to those of healthy volunteers. All participants were assessed for psychopathy through commonly used inventories: the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised and the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale.
Both groups watched a 26-minute-long medley of movie scenes that were selected to portray a "large variability of social and emotional content." Some scenes depicted intense violence. As participants watched the medley, fMRI recorded how various regions of their brains responded to the content.
The goal was to see whether the brains of psychopathic criminals looked and reacted similarly to the brains of healthy subjects who scored high in psychopathic traits. The results showed similar reactions: When both groups viewed violent scenes, the fMRI revealed strong reactions in the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula, brain regions associated with regulating emotion.
These similarities manifested as a positive association: The more psychopathic traits a healthy subject displayed, the more their brains responded like the criminal group. What's more, the fMRI revealed a similar association between psychopathic traits and brain structure, with those scoring high in psychopathy showing lower gray matter density in the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula.
There were some key differences between the groups, however. The researchers noted that the structural abnormalities in the healthy sample were mainly associated with primary psychopathic traits, which are: inclination to lie, lack of remorse, and callousness. Meanwhile, the functional responses of the healthy subjects were associated with secondary psychopathic traits: impulsivity, short temper, and low tolerance for frustration.
Overall, the study further illuminates some of the biological drivers of psychopathy, and it adds nuance to common conceptions of the differences between psychopathy and being "healthy."
Why do some psychopaths become criminals?
The million-dollar question remains unanswered: Why do some psychopaths end up in prison, while others (or, people who score high in psychopathic traits) lead well-functioning lives? The researchers couldn't give a definitive answer, but they did note that psychopathic criminals had lower connectivity within "key nodes of the social and emotional brain networks, including amygdala, insula, thalamus, and frontal pole."
"Thus, even though there are parallels in the regional responsiveness of the brain's affective circuit in the convicted psychopaths and well-functioning subjects with psychopathic traits, it is likely that the disrupted functional connectivity of this network is specific to criminal psychopathy."
A year ago, the Center for Countering Digital Hate warned of the parallel pandemics — the biological contagion of COVID-19 and the social contagion of misinformation, aiding the spread of the disease. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, anti-vaccine accounts have gained 10 million new social media followers, while we have witnessed arson attacks against 5G masts, hospital staff abused for treating COVID patients, and conspiracists addressing crowds of thousands.
Many have refused to follow guidance issued to control the spread of the virus, motivated by beliefs in falsehoods about its origins and effects. The reluctance we see in some to get the COVID vaccine is greater amongst those who rely on social media rather than traditional media for their information. In a pandemic, lies cost lives, and it has felt like a new conspiracy theory has sprung up online every day.
How we, as social media users, behave in response to misinformation can either enable or prevent it from being seen and believed by more people.
The rules are different online
If a colleague mentions in the office that Bill Gates planned the pandemic, or a friend at dinner tells the table that the COVID vaccine could make them infertile, the right thing to do is often to challenge their claims. We don't want anyone to be left believing these falsehoods.
But digital is different. The rules of physics online are not the same as they are in the offline world. We need new solutions for the problems we face online.
Now, imagine that in order to reply to your friend, you must first hand him a megaphone so that everyone within a five-block radius can hear what he has to say. It would do more damage than good, but this is essentially what we do when we engage with misinformation online.
Think about misinformation as being like the coronavirus — when we engage with it, we help to spread it to everyone else with whom we come into contact. If a public figure with a large following responds to a post containing misinformation, they ensure the post is seen by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people with one click. Social media algorithms also push content into more users' newsfeeds if it appears to be engaging, so lots of interactions from users with relatively small followings can still have unintended negative consequences.
The trend of people celebrating and posting photos of themselves or loved ones receiving the vaccine has been far more effective than any attempt to disprove a baseless claim about Bill Gates or 5G mobile technology.
Additionally, whereas we know our friend from the office or dinner, most of the misinformation we see online will come from strangers. They often will be from one of two groups — true believers, whose minds are made up, and professional propagandists, who profit from building large audiences online and selling them products (including false cures). Both of these groups use trolling tactics, that is, seeking to trigger people to respond in anger, thus helping them reach new audiences and thereby gaming the algorithm.
On the day the COVID vaccine was approved in the UK, anti-vaccine activists were able to provoke pro-vaccine voices into posting about thalidomide, exposing new audiences to a reason to distrust the medical establishment. Those who spread misinformation understand the rules of the game online; it's time those of us on the side of enlightenment values of truth and science did too.
How to fight online misinformation
Of course, it is much easier for social media companies to take on this issue than for us citizens. Research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Vax Watch last month found that 65% of anti-vaccine content on social media is linked to just twelve individuals and their organizations. Were the platforms to simply remove the accounts of these superspreaders, it would do a huge amount to reduce harmful misinformation.
The problem is that social media platforms are resistant to do so. These businesses have been built by constantly increasing the amount of time users spend on their platforms. Getting rid of the creators of engaging content that has millions of people hooked is antithetical to the business model. It will require intervention from governments to force tech companies to finally protect their users and society as a whole.
So, what can the rest of us do, while we await state regulation?
Instead of engaging, we should be outweighing the bad with the good. Every time you see a piece of harmful misinformation, share advice or information from a trusted source, like the WHO or BBC, on the same subject. The trend of people celebrating and posting photos of themselves or loved ones receiving the vaccine has been far more effective than any attempt to disprove a baseless claim about Bill Gates or 5G mobile technology. In the attention economy that governs tech platforms, drowning out is a better strategy than rebuttal.
Imran Ahmed is CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
