Six on History: Water
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"LAST SPRING, when COVID descended and my sons’ school shut down, we went to the river. The river I am speaking of is one of Maine’s tidal rivers. Twice a day, the brackish water flows behind our house through hemlocks, oaks, and spartina grass to meet a freshwater stream that cascades over slippery rocks bordered by black alders.
At first it was just instinctive: we needed to get outside before doing any math or spelling. Our boys needed to start their days listening to the burble of water and smelling the dank must of mud.
I’m not sure who first saw the wriggly, almost see-through, three-inch bodies of the elvers, or baby eels. But I think it was my energetic five-year-old because I remember his face. When he told me, he had run all the way back to our house through the woods and up our steep bank. His eyes were shining and he was breathless from exertion and excitement. His words tumbled one over the other, and his hands played out the drama of what he had found.
What started then as a thrilling curiosity became, soon, a passion for our whole family.
Morning after morning, we watched the elvers make their way from the briny water of the river, up granite rocks, and into the higher pools of the gushing stream. As the whole world stopped, we could look more closely. Nothing was calling us back to the house, or, for that matter, away from the house. It was just us and the river and the herons and the eels. Now, finally, we could pay attention.
This became one of the most amazing migration stories we could ever witness or tell. These tiny, vulnerable creatures had begun life as willow leaf–shaped larvae, or leptocephali, far away, it is believed, in the Sargasso Sea, an area of free-floating sargassum, a kind of seaweed, in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. From there, they had floated for fifteen months on the warm, swift currents of the Gulf Stream to the mouth of our tidal river, where they had turned into transparent glass eels. They then migrated to small, rocky pools in the fresh water of our stream, where they turned into the slightly darker elvers we first witnessed. Soon they became yellow-brown eels, and, eventually, much larger silver eels. They might live in our stream for ten or even fifty years until their internal clocks tell them to swim back to the Sargasso Sea to procreate and die.
One night, we camped by the river so that we could go out into the darkness and observe the elvers with our headlamps. During the day, we measured the river and did math to try to estimate how long it would take one elver to travel 500 feet; we tried to figure how much distance one leptocephalus larva could possibly cover floating on the Gulf Steam currents from the Sargasso Sea to our river.
Despite these painful conversations, I am holding on to hope. Because two young boys, in the quiet time of a global pandemic, fell in love with slithery eels.
As spring gave way to summer, my sons were diligent about not putting on sunscreen or any kind of bug dope before going to the stream to splash about. We had learned that chemicals in the water will kill these delicate creatures.
My eleven-year-old, a patient and quiet soul, found that he could sit in a pool to cool off, his back against a rock, water flowing all around him, as dark elvers wriggled up the damp face of the rock to the next pool; they were so close they almost touched his arm. After each elver passed, he would take his hand and gently drip some more water onto the rock to make it a bit damper for the next.
When other masked families came, my sons taught their children about elvers. They designed a T-shirt to help raise awareness for these small, endangered, and overfished creatures, and they asked me to contact Maine Audubon for help.
At night, I read aloud the sections about “Anguilla” from Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind and the more recent Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson.
When fall arrived, my sons were delighted to see a female silver eel making her way back down the stream and into the saline water. They imagined her starting the long journey to the Sargasso Sea under moonlight, and they hoped she would make it safely.
A year later, we are all still home. It is April, and a cold wind spits rain and snow onto our daffodils, but the stream has finally thawed. Every morning we make a pilgrimage to its banks and lean down to peer into the water. We are hoping to see new babies making their way up the rocks, into the pools, and disappearing into the dark, watery caves. So far, only one has arrived.
We take the car out and scan the river for nets. We discuss the “cold blob” in the Gulf Stream, ocean acidification, warming waters, pesticides, microplastics, a diminishing eel population worldwide, and man’s great desire to understand the eel—often at the cost of the eel. We talk about what more our family can do to raise awareness.
Despite these painful conversations, I am holding on to hope. Because two young boys, in the quiet time of a global pandemic, fell in love with slithery eels.
And by watching them fall in love, what I know now, at this crucial moment for our planet, is that, even in the face of hardship—or maybe because of hardship—people want to care deeply about something. And once they do, they will work like hell to save it."
At least one or two people usually drowned in Pineview every summer after getting hit by a boat, crashing a jet ski, or just failing to wear a life jacket. When my dad was in high school, he used to pull the bodies out as a rescue diver. Years later, I did my own scuba certification 20 feet down in the cold, murky waters where I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. The ever-present possibility of bumping into a corpse gave the place an edgy, Twin Peaks vibe in my memories.
Years ago, the state drained Pineview for repairs to the dam and discovered a ’49 Ford featuring a toilet bolted to the driver’s side floor in lieu of a seat. My dad’s high school auto shop buddies had rolled their class project into the reservoir late one summer night in 1966, after failing to find a reliable parking space for it after graduation. Cars, mostly stolen, have now been surfacing regularly in Pineview as the water recedes. The sheriff’s department had to rescue some boaters this summer after they crashed their boat at 20 miles an hour into a sandbar where deep water should have been. Islands are forming.
High temperatures and low water levels are also disrupting the reservoir’s already tenuous ecosystem. In 2019, thousands of young black crappies washed up on shore in a massive die-off. In 2018, Pineview suffered the first of several major toxic algae blooms—sheets of green slime encouraged by high temperatures and some help from lawn chemicals and agricultural fertilizer that also drain into the reservoir. The health department warned people not to swim there or to let their pets in, as cyanobacteria in the green slime can be fatal to animals and make people sick. It closed a beach and marina that year.
During the summer of 2021, the algae returned, along with high levels of E. coli from dubious septic systems in the valley. But Pineview was already so low that at least one boat dock had to be closed early in June, limiting the usual parade of power boats. (That didn’t prevent four people from drowning by July, however.) In September, the XTerra off-road triathlon had to cancel its swimming leg because the reservoir was too toxic to race in.
The state of the reservoir isn’t totally surprising. Pineview has always been something of an unnatural place in an otherwise wild space. With its concrete retaining walls and artificial shorelines, the reservoir is like a bathtub (or toilet, depending on your perspective) planted on the edge of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest in the lovely Ogden Valley, where elk, deer, wild turkeys, and quail frequent the riparian areas along the Ogden River. Construction on Pineview started in 1934, during the glory days of western dam building, when the federal Bureau of Reclamation was overseeing the breakneck construction of Hoover, Shasta, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee—the largest concrete dams ever built.
At the time, Ogden was grappling not with intense droughts but with major flooding. The original 600-foot-long concrete dam was part of the Ogden River Project, designed to control spring flooding and provide irrigation for farmers working the spit between the Wasatch mountains and the Great Salt Lake. At more than 5,000 feet above sea level, Pineview’s stored bounty flowed easily down the mountain to Ogden to provide drinking water and irrigation to farms and even a couple of golf courses. But like so much of the West, the area has seen explosive growth over the past 20 years. Ogden City has about 30 percent more residents than it did when I left for college; the surrounding Weber County population has surged 65 percent since 1990.
Utah is the third-driest state in the country. Weber County gets about 21 inches of rain a year. Just 40 miles west, annual rainfall in the the Great Salt Lake desert drops to about 5 inches, and the summers have always been hot. Theoretically, few people should be able to live here without starving to death. The nomadic Ute tribes believed that staying in one place meant certain death because the harsh climate obviously was not amenable to farming. But the Mormon pioneers who came over the mountains fleeing religious persecution in the mid-1800s made the desert bloom.
“Without realizing it, they were laying the foundation of the most ambitious desert civilization the world has seen,” wrote Marc Reisner in his 1986 classic Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. “In the New World, Indians had dabbled with irrigation, and the Spanish had improved their techniques, but the Mormons attacked the desert full-bore, flooded it, subverted its dreadful indifference—moralized it—until they had made a Mesopotamia in America….And if history is any guide, the odds that we can sustain it would have to be regarded as low.”
As the Harper’s columnist and Ogden native Bernard DeVoto observed back in the 1950s, the Wasatch Mountains are like “humid islands” in the desert sea of the Mormon Mesopotamia. Thousands of feet above the valley, the rugged peaks trap snow in the winter. In the spring the snow melts and runs off into the valley, where the Mormons, later with help from the federal Bureau of Reclamation, would build a series of reservoirs like Pineview to store that spring runoff for irrigation and drinking water. “Desert and mountains have exerted an absolute determinism,” DeVoto wrote of the fate of people in Utah. “Every generation has to learn that it is subject to no exception.”
We are relearning that lesson now. Pineview’s massive drop in water levels didn’t start this year, but in 2020, previously the state’s driest year on record. After 2020’s boiling hot summer, 2021 started off with below average snowpack and Pineview got only about 15 percent of the normal spring runoff. Most of that was soaked up by the parched earth before it could replenish the reservoir. In September of this year, after the state’s hottest summer on record, the water district shut off “secondary water” supplies from Pineview early because water that had promiscuously sprinkled people’s lawns (and often sidewalks) for years in this arid desert was simply gone.
The Washington Post this month reported on a new study in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment predicting that the snowless mountains we’re seeing in Utah may indeed be the new normal. Thanks to climate change, the authors warn, “the potential for persistent low-to-no snow to disrupt the [Western US] water system is substantial, potentially even catastrophic.” The study predicted such a scenario 35 to 60 years out, but in Utah, the future already seems here. Just look at Pineview.
While residents prayed for rain, the state legislature once again shot down even the most elementary water conservation measures, like a proposed bill that would have required low-flow toilets and shower heads in new construction.Utah’s elected leaders’ response to the water crisis has not been encouraging. Over the summer, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called on help from a higher power. “We need more rain and we need it now,” Cox said in an official statement. “We need some divine intervention. That’s why I’m asking Utahns of all faiths to join me in a weekend of prayer June 4 through the 6th.” While residents dutifully prayed for rain, the state legislature once again shot down even the most elementary water conservation measures, like a proposed bill that would have required low-flow toilets and shower heads in new construction.
Many Utah politicians are openly skeptical of climate change. During a September meeting of the state legislature’s Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Interim Committee on the drought and other water issues, legislators viewed a video from the right-wing propaganda outfit PragerU on the evils of renewable energy. Redge Johnson, the executive director of the governor’s Utah Public Lands Policy coordinating office, testified that what the state really needed to do was cut down more trees, which he said were causing forest fires. “Every one of those additional trees over historic norm is a straw taking water out of the system,” he alleged.
So when I recently started asking questions about what the long-term plan was for Pineview, I was surprised to learn that the local water officials in charge aren’t just praying for a good snow year right now. Pineview is one of seven reservoirs managed by the Weber Basin Conservancy District, a utility created in 1950 as the local sponsor for Bureau of Reclamation water infrastructure projects. Today it’s the water supplier for 700,000 residents in a five-county area around Ogden. Jon Parry, the district’s assistant general manager, received both his BS and master’s degrees in civil engineering at Brigham Young University in Provo, an LDS church–owned school not known for producing many radical eco-warriors. But he’s not a climate change denier either.
Parry is not quite prepared to say Pineview’s diminished state might be the new normal. “Hopefully it’s an event that we don’t see very frequently,” he told me. But his water district recently commissioned a climate vulnerability study to help prepare for a hotter future. Parry says the study can’t predict exactly how the region might change: will the disappearing snow be replaced by more rain, and thus more floods? Or will it simply suffer more drought? No one can say for sure. But the overall conclusion shows what already seems obvious: The Wasatch front, where two-thirds of Utah’s population resides, will not have enough water to support its current exponential growth. The real estate developers, however, don’t seem to have gotten the memo.
In 2013, some out-of-state tech bros backed by the billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel bought my beloved Powder Mountain, a tiny, uber-local ski resort about 15 miles from Pineview. The place where I grew up skiing for $15 lift tickets has been turned into “a utopian club for millennial elites,” as the Guardian described it, with planned construction of exclusive homes to create a community of “likeminded millionaires” bought up by the likes of Virgin Airlines founder Richard Branson and four-hour lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss. * Lift tickets now cost $135 a day—about five times higher than the rate of inflation from my high school days.
The “picaresque” view of Pineview Reservoir from the Escapes at Edgewater, Eden, Utah.
Stephanie Mencimer/Mother Jones
The bros host conferences they describe as “Davos for millennials,” where they can ruminate on their philanthropy in a beautiful mountain setting. The problem, of course, is that all this elite real estate needs water. Powder Mountain’s new owners spent several years fighting with farmers in the valley below over water rights. In August this year, the Wolf Creek Water and Sewer Improvement District took the rare step of halting water hookups for new construction south of Powder Mountain because of dwindling supplies, infuriating developers. The move effectively halted the sprawl of multimillion-dollar mountain chalets for now.
I hadn’t been up to Pineview in many years, so in mid-October, I drove up there with my mom. Childhood friends from Ogden had warned me that it was a shocking sight. They were right. The “beaches” were long stretches of sand where water used to lap. As we drove the 28 miles around the lake, I was dumbfounded by the new development—luxury homes abutting a shoreline my teenage self would never have predicted becoming anyone’s idea of luxury. We pulled in to one of these places still under construction called “Escapes at Edgewater,” touted as “luxury lakefront homes” with a view of the “picaresque Pineview reservoir.”
Whether Pineview recovers in time for next year’s boaters and floaters all depends on this winter’s snowfall. So far, it’s not looking promising. The snowpack in the Wasatch mountains around Pineview is currently at 50 percent of normal. And no amount of unicornage can make it snow at Powder Mountain, a resort that usually opened by Thanksgiving when I was a kid. As of December 13, it was still closed. That was one way of describing it. On the day we took it in, the “picaresque” view was mostly mud flats. Two of the houses were already occupied, and signs indicated that the development was mostly sold out. We wondered if those buyers were having second thoughts about their purchases, or if they just assumed that the water would come back. I tried to ask the developer, but my phone messages went unreturned.
In the grand scheme of things, a shrinking Pineview probably does not rise to the level of a climate catastrophe like the massive California fires or the floods in Hawaii. Ogden City has other sources of drinking water. People will finally have to get rid of their lawns. And yet, Pineview’s slow death feels like another one of those small yet brutal blows to the soul from unchecked climate change—mortal grief caused by the irreversible loss of even ordinary landscapes we once took for granted. Pineview has always been a crappy fake lake, but it was our crappy fake lake, a repository of generations of memories and a ’49 Ford. I am mourning as I watch it die."
Clarification: After this story published, Ferris contacted Mother Jones and said, “I sold my plot of land at Powder Mountain years ago to distance myself from a lot of what’s happening there.”
" ... The Delaware Aqueduct is the most recent of the city’s aqueducts and its story is similar to the Catskill Aqueduct–the Pepacton Reservoir (aka the Downsville Reservoir or the Downsville Dam) was formed by not only flooding four towns, but also submerging half of the existing Delaware and Northern Railroad. This reservoir provides 25% of the city’s drinking water, and combined the Catskill and Delaware Aqueduct provides 90% of the city’s water.
In total, the construction of these reservoirs and aqueducts resulted in the destruction of 25 communities and the relocation of 5,500 people across five New York State counties. Something to think about the next time you run the tap in New York City."
"Plastic waste of all shapes and sizes permeates the world’s oceans. It shows up on beaches, in fish and even in Arctic sea ice. And a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine makes clear that the U.S. is a big part of the problem.
As the report shows, the U.S. produces a large share of the global supply of plastic resin — the precursor material to all plastic industrial and consumer products. It also imports and exports billions of dollars’ worth of plastic products every year.
And only a small fraction of plastic in U.S. household waste streams is recycled. The study calls current U.S. recycling systems “grossly insufficient to manage the diversity, complexity and quantity of plastic waste.”
As scientists who study the effects of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems, we view this report as an important first step on a long road to reducing ocean plastic pollution. While it’s important to make clear how the U.S. is contributing to ocean plastic waste, we see a need for specific, actionable goals and recommendations to mitigate the plastic pollution crisis, and would have liked to see the report go further in that direction.
Plastic Is Showing Up in SeafoodResearchers started documenting marine plastic pollution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Public and scientific interest in the issue exploded in the early 2000s after oceanographer Charles Moore drew attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a region in the central north Pacific where ocean currents concentrate floating plastic trash into spinning collections thousands of miles across.
More plastic garbage patches have now been found in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Unsurprisingly, plastic pervades marine food webs. Over 700 marine species are known to ingest plastic, including over 200 species of fish that humans eat.
Humans also consume plastic that fragments into beverages and food from packaging and inhale microplastic particles in household dust. Scientists are only beginning to assess what this means for public health. Research to date suggests that exposure to plastic-associated chemicals may interfere with hormones that regulate many processes in our bodies, cause developmental problems in children, or alter human metabolic processes in ways that promote obesity
The new report is a sweeping overview of marine plastic pollution, grounded in science. However, many of its conclusions and recommendations have been proposed in various forms for years, and in our view the report could have done more to advance those discussions.
For example, it strongly recommends developing a national marine debris monitoring program, led by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program. We agree with this proposal, but the report does not address what to monitor, how to do it or what the specific goals of monitoring should be.
Ideally, we believe the federal government should create a coalition of relevant agencies, such as NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health, to tackle plastic pollution. Agencies have done this in the past in response to acute pollution events, such as the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but not for chronic problems like marine debris. The report proposes a cross-government effort as well but does not provide specifics.
Graphic showing main types of waste collected on U.S. beaches by Surfrider FoundationActions to detect, track and remove plastic waste from the ocean will require substantial financial support. But there’s little federal funding for marine debris research and cleanup. In 2020, for example, NOAA’s Marine Debris Program budget request was $US7 million, which represents 0.1% of NOAA’s $5.65B 2020 budget. Proposed funding for the Marine Debris Program increased by $9 million for fiscal 2022, which is a step in the right direction.
Even so, making progress on ocean plastic waste will require considerably more funding for academic research, nongovernmental organizations and NOAA’s marine debris activities. Increased support for these programs will help close knowledge gaps, increase public awareness and spur effective action across the entire life cycle of plastics.
The private sector also has a crucial role to play in reducing plastic use and waste. We would have liked to see more discussion in the report of how businesses and industries contribute to the accumulation of ocean plastic waste and their role in solutions.
The report correctly notes that plastic pollution is an environmental justice issue. Minority and low-income communities are disproportionately affected by many activities that produce plastic waste, from oil drilling emissions to toxic chemicals released during the production or incineration of plastics. Some proposals in the report, such as better waste management and increased recycling, may benefit these communities — but only if they are directly involved in planning and carrying them out.
The study also highlights the need to produce less plastic and scale up effective plastic recycling. More public and private funding for solutions like reusable and refillable containers, reduced packaging and standardized plastic recycling processes would increase opportunities for consumers to shift away from single-use disposable products.
Plastic pollution threatens the world’s oceans. It also poses direct and indirect risks to human health. We hope the bipartisan support this study has received is a sign that U.S. leaders are ready to take far-reaching action on this critical environmental problem."
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
"In 2017, following a 140-year legal dispute between the government of Aotearoa New Zealand and the Māori people, the Whanganui River was granted personhood. Two years later, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh bestowed legal personhood on every one of its rivers. Earlier this year, the Magpie River in Quebec became a legal person following a campaign by the Indigenous Innu people. Enforcement is awkward, and rights must be realised through human guardians, but the symbolism of these recognitions is radical and far-reaching. They destabilise conceptions of nature as a store of commodities. Personified rivers are granted the right to flow, the right not to be polluted, and the right to sue.
While rivers elsewhere are gaining moral recognition, England’s are full of shit. No river in England reaches the minimum standard for chemical health, and only 14 per cent are ecologically healthy. Poor regulation of sewage discharge and agricultural run-off has led to the build-up of heavy metals, pesticides, fertilisers, wet wipes, condoms, menstrual products, plastics, endocrine disruptors and pathogens. Fragile ecosystems are being destroyed.
Britain has a combined sewerage system: rainwater drains to the same pipes as wastewater from toilets, showers, sinks, washing machines, farms and factories. The whole foetid runnel sloshes along underground networks into the vats of treatment works, where solids sink into sludge (which can be used as agricultural fertiliser or dried into cakes of fuel for electricity generation), and liquids are tapped off and aerated so that benign micro-organisms can metabolise their hazardous cousins. Once treated, clean water is returned to the wild.
Heavy storms disrupt this scheme by overwhelming sewers with rainwater. To prevent them backing up and spewing dilute excreta through areas of human habitation, untreated sewage is deliberately discharged into rivers and the sea. Guarding against rogue leaks requires us to tolerate calculated spills from time to time, to minimise the overall public health risk.
Overflows are supposed to be exceptional, pis aller events. Yet in 2020, untreated sewage was discharged into rivers in England more than 400,000 times, amounting to three million hours (or 342 years) of flow. Might it be better for the environment for some of us to save the flush and defecate directly into waterways?
Storm overflows are becoming business-as-usual for a confluence of reasons. Climate change is increasing the regularity and severity of storms, and surface water runoff has risen because of urbanisation. Landscapes whose porous soils acted as sponges for excess water, allowing it to gradually evaporate or slowly drain into sewers, have been sealed under less permeable surfaces: concrete, tarmac, block-paving, artificial turf. Britain’s sewer system was designed to service a much smaller population. Private water companies have underinvested in infrastructure and taken advantage of lax government regulation to default to the cheapest option for managing waste – precisely the outcome that sewage infrastructure was designed to avoid.
Earlier this week, 265 Tory MPs rejected an amendment to the environment bill to place a legal duty on water companies not to discharge untreated sewage into rivers. The widespread backlash from constituents seemed to take them by surprise, as though they’d assumed we’d be unfussed by the thought of paddling with tampons and turds. Boris Johnson, as usual, stuck his finger to the wind of social media outrage and hurried through a U-turn: the government will now ask companies to reduce the amount of sewage they pump over the next five years. The details are vague: the objective is not to stem the stream of effluent but to get rid of the stink.
If the Māori were the first people to win legal recognition for a waterway, the British government was the first to fully commodify water. The Thatcher administration put our water on the market in 1989 with all its debts written off. Thirty years later, the private water companies have debts of £50 billion. They’ve paid £13 billion in dividends to shareholders over the past ten years. Meanwhile, household water bills are £2.3 billion higher than they would have been if the system hadn’t been privatised, and our rivers are thick with excrement. Unsurprisingly, 83 per cent of British people are in favour of renationalisating the water industry. They are not alone: 180 cities across the world – including Accra, Berlin, Kuala Lumpur and Paris – have recently remunicipalised their water in response to underinvestment, poor management and soaring bills under private ownership.
When the Whanganui River was granted personhood, the then minister of Treaty Negotiations, Chris Finlayson, acknowledged that ‘some people will say it’s pretty strange to give a natural resource a legal personality. But it’s no stranger than family trusts, or companies.’ It is telling that we are asked to make sense of environmental personhood by analogy with the apparently more intuitive idea of corporate personhood. (Corporate rights follow so naturally from the current economic regime that they can trump those of actual persons: in 2013, the US craft retailer Hobby Lobby was allowed to deny its employees contraception on their health insurance plans on the grounds that the corporation’s religious beliefs must be respected.)
While many Indigenous communities recognise other threads of the biosphere as relatives deserving of moral consideration, Western epistemologies encourage their adherents to see the same entities as commodities whose proprietors and profiteers must be protected. This is a failure of our culture as much as it is a failure of our economy. One of the key ideological tenets of colonisation has been the objectification of people and the environment.
"On a Saturday morning in December of 2020, the RRS Discovery floated in calm waters just east of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the massive undersea mountain range that runs from the Arctic nearly to the Antarctic.
The expedition’s chief scientist, Ben Moat, and others walked up to the bridge to spot the first floats as they popped up. The technicians on deck, clad in hard hats and clipped into harnesses, reeled the cable in. They halted the winch every few minutes to disconnect the floats as well as sensors that measure salinity and temperature at various depths, data used to calculate the pressure, current speed, and volume of water flowing past.
The scientists and technicians are part of an international research collaboration, known as RAPID, that’s collecting readings from hundreds of sensors at more than a dozen moorings dotting the Atlantic roughly along 26.5° North, the line of latitude that runs from the western Sahara to southern Florida.
They are searching for clues about one of the most important forces in the planet’s climate system: a network of ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Critically, they want to better understand how global warming is changing it, and how much more it could shift in the coming decades—even whether it could collapse.
“Measuring this ocean system is vital to understanding our climate,” Moat says.
The Atlantic circulation is, effectively, one leg of the world’s mightiest river. It runs tens of thousands of miles from the Southern Ocean to Greenland and back, ping-ponging between the southwestern coast of Africa, the southeastern US, and Western Europe.
The system carries warm, shallow, salty water northward, transporting about 1.2 million gigawatts of heat energy across RAPID’s array of moorings at any moment. That’s equivalent to about 160 times the energy capacity of the entire world’s electricity system. The currents, which heat up the surrounding air as they travel northward, are a major factor (though not the only one) in why Western Europe is warmer than eastern Canada even though they lie at roughly the same latitude.
The waters become cooler and denser as they reach the high latitudes, forcing the currents to dive miles below the surface, spread outward, and bend back southward. That sinking of the water deep into the ocean helps propel the system.
The problem is the Atlantic circulation seems to be weakening, transporting less water and heat. Because of climate change, melting ice sheets are pouring fresh water into the ocean at the higher latitudes, and the surface waters are retaining more of their heat. Warmer and fresher waters are less dense and thus not as prone to sink, which may be undermining one of the currents’ core driving forces.
Simply put, the currents influence much of the weather we know in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly around the coastal Atlantic but also as far away as Thailand. If the currents change, so too will the weather, disrupting temperature and precipitation patterns that have shaped our lives and societies for centuries.
Some climate models predict that the currents will decline by as much as 45% this century. And evidence from the last ice age shows that the system can eventually switch off or go into a very weak mode, under conditions that global warming may be replicating.
If that happened, it would likely be a climate disaster. It could freeze the far north of Europe, driving down average winter temperatures by more than 10 °C. It might cut crop production and incomes across the continent as much of the land becomes cooler and drier. Sea levels could rise as much as a foot on the Eastern Seaboard, flooding homes and businesses up and down the coast. And the summer monsoons over major parts of Africa and Asia might weaken, raising the odds of droughts and famines that could leave untold numbers without adequate food or water.
It would be a “global catastrophe,” says Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Most scientists say a collapse of the currents is a remote possibility this century, but even a steep slowdown would have significant impacts, potentially cooling and reducing rainfall around the North Atlantic while increasing precipitation across parts of the tropics. It might raise sea level by about five inches off the US southeast coast.
Despite the stakes, scientists have only a coarse comprehension of the currents’ behavior, the balance of the forces that drive them, or their susceptibility to shifting climate conditions. That’s why Moat and others are so keen to observe the Atlantic circulation.
But much of what has been discovered so far is that the Atlantic circulation is more variable, perplexing, and perhaps unpredictable than previously understood.
NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory is a squat, white five-story building, fringed by palm trees on Virginia Key, a barrier island just a few miles from downtown Miami.
The warm upper layer of the Atlantic circulation, known here as the Florida Current, races past the island, squeezed between the state and the Bahamas. It’s an ideal place to observe one of the most powerful stretches of the system, because the topography of the Florida Straits confines the currents, which can otherwise span hundreds of miles, down to dozens. (The Florida Current is part of the Gulf Stream, a stretch of the Atlantic circulation that traces the southeastern US before cutting across the ocean to Europe.)
NOAA scientists have been monitoring the Florida Straits at around 27° North almost continuously since 1982, in large part by taking advantage of underwater telephone cables. The now-defunct phone lines along the seafloor provide a cheap, unobtrusive way of observing the Atlantic circulation.
The passing seawater creates a voltage along the sides of the cables, which NOAA researchers found they could reliably measure. They receive daily readings from instruments set up in a telephone trunk room on Grand Bahama Island. With careful calibration, they are able to translate those measurements into estimates of how much water flows across that line of latitude.
(1) The shallow upper leg of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation carries warm, salty water northward. (2) The warm currents heat up the surrounding air and land, helping to create temperate weather over Western Europe. (3) The surface waters become cooler and denser as they near the Arctic, driving the currents deep below the surface and helping to propel the system. (4) The deep, cool waters run back down the Atlantic.
Meanwhile, William Johns and other oceanographers at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, located just across the causeway from the NOAA lab, have used sensor-strung moorings and other instruments to study the currents east of the Bahamas since the 1980s. They’ve observed both the deep, cool boundary current flowing south and a stretch of the warm northward limb that forks off and flows around the islands.
These efforts began as part of a broader push to improve scientific understanding of how the oceans work and interact with the climate, says Molly Baringer, deputy director of the NOAA lab, who helped develop the cable program.
But the ongoing cable measurements and the historical records have taken on added importance as concerns have grown about the effects global warming could have on the Atlantic circulation, and the impact that could have, in turn, on the climate. “It’s the way the ocean moves around heat,” Baringer says. “You have to understand it to understand climate change.”
Through the 1990s, there were a growing number of other attempts to measure parts of the currents, using short stretches of anchored moorings, drifting floats, shipboard observations, and other means. But oceanographers came to realize that these snapshot observations weren’t enough to fully capture the system’s behavior. They needed ways to continuously monitor the currents across the ocean in order to distinguish short-term fluctuations from long-term trends, among other things.
The UK’s National Oceanography Centre established the RAPID effort in 2004 to do just that, anchoring cables across the Atlantic. It made obvious sense to collaborate with NOAA and the University of Miami research groups as well, taking advantage of those ongoing monitoring efforts.
Moat says the researchers are trying to shed light on how variable the currents are, how much heat they deliver, how much carbon they pull down from the air, how harmonized the southward and northward limbs are, how much local winds influence the system, and—critically—whether or not the Atlantic circulation is slowing down at the rate climate models predict.
Out at seaOn a sunny day in early November, I followed a pair of NOAA researchers down a pier on the southeastern edge of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science campus.
We ascended the gangway onto the F.G. Walton Smith, a 96-foot-long catamaran with dark green hulls and a white deckhouse, owned by the University of Miami.
Roughly every quarter, at least in pre-pandemic times, researchers from both institutions have boarded the vessel for 30-hour sprints out and back to the Bahamas. They use an A-frame and winch on the stern to lower what are known as CTDs into the waters at nine stations along the way, near the line of the old telephone cable.
The CTDs include a carousel of tubes that capture water samples, as well as sensors that measure temperature, pressure, oxygen saturation, and other water properties.
Denis Volkov, one of the principal researchers on NOAA’s monitoring project, explains that these voyages, along with more frequent excursions on smaller vessels, allow the researchers to determine how much heat and salt are moving through the straits, how fast the currents are at varying depths, where the water moving through originates, and how the currents are affecting relative sea levels along the coasts of Florida and the Bahamas.
Separately, the research teams usually go out on longer voyages every 18 months, to remove and replace sensors from three or four moorings on the eastern side of the Bahamas. Their UK counterparts do the same job on the eastern side of the ocean and along the Atlantic Ridge.
Other groups have set up arrays of moorings across different parts of the Atlantic to better understand how varying components work, how tightly the system is connected, and whether changes in one part are rippling throughout.
Susan Lozier, an oceanographer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, leads an international effort known as OSNAP, which began in 2014. It has anchored cables across the Labrador Sea and from the southeastern edge of Greenland to the coast of Scotland.
The hope of the international research effort was to go to the sources of the deep-water sinking, which is largely responsible for propelling the currents in the Atlantic, to “try to get a much better understanding of the mechanisms driving change in the AMOC,” Lozier says.
So far, what the monitoring programs have largely found is that the Atlantic circulation is more variable than previously believed, she says.
Its strength and speed fluctuate dramatically from month to month, year to year, and region to region. Most of the deep-water sinking in the North Atlantic seems to be occurring not in the Labrador Sea, as long believed, but rather in the basins to the east of Greenland. The northward- and southward-flowing limbs operate more independently than previously understood. Local wind patterns seem to exercise a more influential role than expected. And some findings are just befuddling.
It’s very likely that the Atlantic circulation has weakened. Studies by Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute and others have concluded it’s about 15% slower than during the mid-20th century and may be at its weakest in more than 1,000 years. Both findings are based, in part, on long-term reconstructions of its behavior using records like Atlantic Ocean temperatures and the size of grains on the ocean floor, which can reflect changes in deep-sea currents.
There’s also “strong agreement” in models that the currents will continue to weaken this century if greenhouse-gas emissions continue.
Data from the RAPID moorings showed a general weakening in the Atlantic circulation from 2004 to 2012, with a sudden 30% drop from 2009 to 2010. That was likely a major contributor to an especially cold winter in northwest Europe in 2012, as well as rapid sea-level rise in that period along the northeastern US coast, reaching about 13 centimeters around New York. The slowdown was an order of magnitude larger than global climate models predicted.
The currents rebounded substantially in the years that followed. But the strength of the circulation is still below where it was when the measurements started. In fact, it has decreased even more than climate-change models predicted.
Some say the data suggests that the system has already shifted into a weaker state. But it showed such a wild swing that others believe it was more likely an indication how much the ocean currents can vary across a decade, rather than any clear result linked to global warming.
Johns says it’s simply unclear at this point. “We can’t be 100% sure whether it’s a longer-term trend—i.e., related to climate change—or an oscillation that can happen naturally,” he said during an interview in his office overlooking the Florida Straits.
An added wrinkle is that the Florida Current flowing by in the background has only declined a small amount since 1982, and not quite a statistically significant amount at that, according to NOAA’s findings. That’s weird, because that powerful, concentrated flow is “the place you’d most expect” to see a weakening trend according to climate models, Johns says. The data is “showing two slightly different stories,” he says.
He and others believe it’s likely to simply take more time—years to decades—before the currents reveal clearly how climate change is affecting them.
A collapseThe reason scientists worry that the Atlantic circulation could dramatically weaken is that it repeatedly did so in the ancient past.
Nearly 13,000 years ago, as the Earth was emerging from the last ice age, the climate across the North Atlantic region suddenly began cooling again. Temperatures plunged back toward nearly glacial-era conditions for a more than 1,000-year period known as the Younger Dryas, named for a wildflower that flourished in the frosty conditions of Europe in that era.
The leading theory on what triggered it involves the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which stretched millions of square miles across North America. As temperatures rose, it rapidly melted, pouring fresh glacial water into the ocean through the Mississippi River.
The massive influx of fresh water could have reduced the salinity and density of the surface water enough to undermine the mechanisms driving the Atlantic circulation at its origin, flipping it off or sending it into a very weak mode, says Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, a paleoclimate researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
By the late 1980s, some scientists started to wonder: Could the effects of global warming halt the currents much as the breakup of the Laurentide likely did, bringing about a more abrupt climate shift than researchers had been considering?
For years, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called a shutdown of the Atlantic circulation this century “very unlikely,” defined as a 0 to 10% probability. But as several studies note, the climate models have biases that could overstate the stability of the current, in part because they don’t incorporate increasing meltwater from Greenland ice sheets.
The latest UN report, released in August, downgrades the assurance that a collapse won’t occur before 2100 to “medium confidence,” citing that “neglect” in the models as well as the recent findings by a pair of scientists at the University of Copenhagen.
The researchers, Johannes Lohmann and Peter Ditlevsen, ran numerous scenarios on a model developed at the university, turning the knobs on the levels, rates, and time frames of runoff from the Greenland ice sheets.
The general conception of a tipping point is that there’s some fixed physical threshold beyond which the system trips into a different state. But they found that a lesser-known phenomenon known as a rate-induced tipping point, triggered by a sudden increase in the system’s rate of change, might halt the currents as well. In other words, too much change occurring too fast could cause the system to break down.
The Atlantic circulation could be susceptible to this if the water flowing from ice sheets increases rapidly enough, according to the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March.
It’s just one model and one study, but it suggests that the climate system could be more fragile than previously appreciated.
These “chaotic dynamics” mean that “we maybe cannot expect, even if our models get much better, to be able to predict with 100% confidence whether such an element of the climate system will go into another state or not,” Lohmann says.
An August paper by another researcher added to these concerns, concluding that the currents might be closer than expected to the standard sort of tipping point as well.
Scientists have found telltale early warning signs of a collapse in models and geological records from the last ice age, wrote the author, Niklas Boers, a professor of Earth system modeling at the Technical University of Munich and a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“The only thing we can say is that in the course of the last century the AMOC has moved toward its critical point.”
The signs include decreasing sea-surface temperatures and salinity in the North Atlantic, a salinity “pile-up” in the Southern Atlantic, and a characteristic shift in current patterns known as a “critical slowing down.” Boers found evidence of these warnings across eight different records, suggesting “an almost complete loss of stability.”
“In the course of the last century, the AMOC may have evolved from relatively stable conditions to a point close to a critical transition,” Boers wrote.
But how close is “close?”
In an email, Boers said it remains difficult to define the threshold in terms of a specific global temperature or time, given the numerous layers of uncertainty.
“The only thing we can say is that in the course of the last century the AMOC has moved toward its critical point (which on its own had not been expected by many),” he wrote in an email. “And that with every additional ton of emitted greenhouse gases, we’ll likely push it further.”
So what happens if the Atlantic circulation collapses?
The Day After Tomorrow, the popular 2004 disaster film in which an abrupt halt of the currents shock-freezes the Northern Hemisphere over a few nightmarish days, is a wild Hollywood exaggeration. The changes brought about if the network of ocean currents collapsed would unfold over years or decades, not days, and there’s no reason to expect tsunamis flooding Manhattan or ice entombing the city.
But a shutdown would flip the global climate system into a fundamentally different state, inflicting somewhat unpredictable consequences across large parts of the planet.
The planet is on track to exceed very dangerous warming levels, leaving us with fewer and fewer options.
Much of Europe could turn into a starkly different world, according to a study by researchers at the Met Office Hadley Centre in the UK, which closely analyzed the effects on that continent using a high-resolution climate model. Within 50 to 80 years after a massive infusion of fresh water that halts the Atlantic circulation, sea surface temperatures drop as much as 15 °C from the Barents to the Labrador Seas, and 2 to 10 °C across much of the rest of the North Atlantic.
Sea ice drifts farther and farther south, reaching the northern tip of the United Kingdom in late winter.
The continent experiences extensive cooling as well. Winter storms intensify, become more frequent, or both. On average, most of Europe gets drier, aside from the Mediterranean during summer. But more of the precipitation that does fall arrives in the form of snow.
The Garonne River in southern France carries 30% less water during peak winter periods. Growth in the needleleaf forests of Northern Europe slows by as much as 50%. Crop production “decreases dramatically” in Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Ukraine.
Laura Jackson, the lead author of the study, stresses that it was an “idealized” model, using a large amount of fresh water to quickly shut down the Atlantic circulation and shorten the length of the experiments. “A more realistic scenario, or a different model, might show different magnitudes of change,” she said in an email.
Still, other studies looking beyond Europe have concluded that a collapse or significant weakening of the Atlantic circulation would have wide-scale effects on much of the world.
Some models find that parts of Asia and North America could grow cooler as well. The slowing currents could disrupt the delivery of crucial nutrients, devastating certain fish populations and otherwise altering marine ecosystems.
As the Gulf Stream subsides and flattens, ocean levels could quickly rise eight to 12 inches along the southeastern US. The tropical rain belt could drift south, weakening rainfall patterns across parts of Africa and Asia and ratcheting up monsoons in the Southern Hemisphere.
A certain amount of weakening may act as a counterforce against climate change, mitigating to some degree the warming that would otherwise take place. But how these competing forces balance out overall and over time would depend on multiple, overlapping layers of uncertainty: how much the system weakens; whether it shuts down entirely; how much less carbon dioxide the oceans, forests, and farms pull down; and how much warmer the planet gets.
The ocean mattersThe potential for a steep slowdown or collapse of the AMOC raises difficult questions.
Some who study the AMOC believe that people, and the press in particular, are overly obsessed with the catastrophe scenario—“the drama” of The Day After Tomorrow, as Lozier puts it.
This, she stresses, is largely a distraction that misses the point. We don’t need some danger in the distant future to underscore the risks of climate change: there are plenty of serious consequences unfolding in the present.
“I love the AMOC and have studied it forever,” Lozier says. “But when we talk about what we should really be concerned with, it’s ocean warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, hurricanes. These are the things we know are happening. Those are huge impacts. So I think we just always should keep this in mind.”
When I met with Baringer, on a picnic table outside of NOAA’s lab to comply with covid protocols, I asked how concerned she is about climate models predicting a steep slowdown or possible collapse of the Atlantic circulation.
Baringer said she doesn’t “worry that much” about it. That’s in part because she thinks it’s hard to properly account for all the feedbacks in such a complex and roughly understood system—and in part because, like Lozier, she thinks there are more pressing climate concerns. She listed ocean acidification, droughts, wildfires, and sea-level rise, which she believes the field is largely underestimating.
So why, I asked, is it so important to study the Atlantic circulation?
“I don’t like that question,” she said, “because it’s sort of like asking: Why do we study oceanography in general?
“The ocean matters. The ocean carries a huge amount of heat. It sequesters carbon. It moves nutrients around. If we didn’t have the ocean circulation or upwelling, you wouldn’t have fish. The whole ocean matters, and the AMOC, that large circulation, is a big part of what the ocean is doing.”
But that is also arguably the biggest reason to worry about how human actions could alter one of the planet’s most complex—and exquisite—natural systems. There are, as Lozier and Baringer note, more imminent climate risks to worry about. But in the long term, perturbing this immensely powerful network of ocean currents could be the biggest climate risk the world is taking."
