Over the last month or so, you may have noticed several articles in the news about the Gulf Stream being at its weakest in over 1,000 years. The headlines rightfully had a sense of urgency to them, and some were downright alarming:
Atlantic Ocean current at weakest state in ‘over a millenium’
The Gulf Stream is slowing to a ‘tipping point’ and could disappear
New Study Suggests Atlantic Ocean Circulation System Could Collapse
Essentially, the articles talk about what is known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC. The AMOC, “sometimes called the Atlantic’s conveyor belt”, is a “vast ocean current system “that includes the Gulf Stream, and that moves warm salty water from the tropics to regions further north”. Research has shown that the AMOC is “at its weakest state in the last 1,600 years”, with the climate crisis likely playing a role. Scientists are concerned that the AMOC “could eventually reach a ‘tipping point’ and shut down – with potentially disastrous consequences” for the world.
The fact that this issue has been on the news a lot lately is a very interesting coincidence, because this past January, an interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, physicists, and climate scientists —including some of us at CASA—submitted a major grant proposal that aims to significantly contribute towards addressing this crisis. The problem is that state-of-the-art climate models are unable to describe sudden transitions such as the stagnation of the Warm Gulf Stream or extreme events such as large variations in the atmospheric circulation. Our proposal on “Transitions, Extremes and Climate” (TrEC) was submitted to NWO’s Zwaartekracht Programme, and requests 21 million Euros over 10 years to fund basic research to develop mathematical and computational methods to predict and understand transitions and extreme events in the climate system, such as the possible AMOC tipping point described in the news.
The TrEC consortia includes researchers from TU Delft, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, University of Leiden, University of Twente, Vrij Universiteit Amsterdam, and, of course, TU Eindhoven. The four researchers from TU/e are all from CASA – Mark Peletier and I were involved in the core team, while Laura Iapichino and Cecilia Pagliantini are associated researchers. Mark had been involved in the discussions since 2018, and I joined the team soon after I came to the TU/e in 2020. If the proposal is successful, we hope and expect that many other CASA researchers will be involved in this important effort.
It would be wonderful, indeed, if the proposal would get accepted. Not only would it be a gratifying end to a year (or, in Mark’s case, three years!) of hard work, but it would also give us the opportunity to put our skills to work in addressing a problem that affects all of us.
