Meridional overturning circulation in the South Atlantic at the last glacial maximum

Atlantic meridional overturning circulation during the Last Glacial Maximum.

The circulation of the deep Atlantic Ocean during the height of the last ice age appears to have been quite different from today. We review observations implying that Atlantic meridional overturning circulation during the Last Glacial Maximum was neither extremely sluggish nor an enhanced version of present-day circulation. The distribution of the decay products of uranium in sediments is consi...

Stability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation in the Last Glacial Maximum climate

[1] The stability of the glacial Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is examined using a coupled model of intermediate complexity. Two slightly different climatic states are generated. One has a southward overturning freshwater transport at the southern border of the Atlantic basin, the other a northward transport. Pulse experiments with varying magnitude always result in a collapsed ci...

Changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

Introduction: the concept of the MOC Climate models project a slow down of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) in the twenty-first century. This slow down is expected to affect climate over Europe. In particular, it damps the temperature rise due to the emission of greenhouse gases. The MOC is associated with the thermohaline circulation (ThC), which is the large-scale ocean c...

Atlantic Dominance of the Meridional Overturning Circulation

North Atlantic (NA) deep-water formation and the resulting Atlantic meridional overturning cell is generally regarded as the primary feature of the global overturning circulation and is believed to be a result of the geometry of the continents. Here, instead, the overturning is viewed as a global energy–driven system and the robustness of NA dominance is investigated within this framework. Usin...

Abyssal Atlantic Circulation during the Last Glacial Maximum