The North Icelandic Jet feeds a giant pattern known as the 'great ocean conveyor belt', which regulates North American and European climates
A newly-discovered deep, cold current flowing off Iceland's coast may mean the North Atlantic is less sensitive to climate change than previously thought.
The North Icelandic Jet feeds the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - or AMOC - a giant pattern known as the 'great ocean conveyor belt', which regulates North American and European climates.
Scientists had previously believed that most of the cold water that formed that deep south-flowing stream came from off the Greenland coast and was made up of fresh glacier-melt water.
Hit movie The Day After Tomorrow showed how a new ice age overtakes America and Europe in the wake of a catastrophic climatic shift
However, the North Icelandic Jet appears to contribute more to the deeper part of the AMOC than the Greenland current does, according to scientists.
The 'conveyor belt' current was introduced in the Al Gore environmental film An Inconvenient Truth, and carries warm surface water from the tropical Atlantic toward the Arctic.
In the process, the water warms the air in high latitudes, then cools, sinks and returns towards the equator, flowing as a deep stream at lower ocean depths.
Because fresh water freezes at a higher temperature than salt water, these specialists suggested that this fresh water from glaciers and other warming-related phenomena would get into the North Atlantic, where it could freeze and prevent the water from sinking to make up the bottom of the conveyor belt.
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