They Hatch. They Swim. They Die. The Gulf Stream Is Collapsing.
How a dying ocean current could rewrite the planet’s climate, food chain and future
On Saturday morning, coffee in hand, I read the latest study on the Gulf Stream.
Halfway through the abstract, I pressed my fingers into my eyes like it might hold the world in place.
Why? The ocean current that keeps cities above water, crops alive, and oceans breathable, is failing.
Imagine this.
A leatherback sea turtle, the largest turtle on Earth, hatches on a beach in the Caribbean. She’s no bigger than your hand. She slips into the surf and disappears into the Atlantic, carried by warm water currents that guide her thousands of miles.
She doesn’t have a map. She has the ocean.
For fifteen years, she drifts and dives, feeding in jellyfish-rich waters off Nova Scotia before turning back. She rides the same invisible path her ancestors have used for millennia, a warm corridor of moving sea called the Gulf Stream.
Now imagine that current falters.
She drifts. She gets lost. She doesn’t make it back.
The Current That Feeds the Planet
The Gulf Stream isn’t just a flow of water. It’s a planetary power line.
It carries warm water from the tropics to the North Atlantic, releasing heat that keeps Europe and the eastern US temperate. It fuels rainfall, shapes monsoons, and helps regulate storm patterns across four continents.
It’s part of a larger system called the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation). If the Gulf Stream is the bloodstream of the Atlantic, the AMOC is its beating heart, moving heat, salt, and nutrients in a great, global loop.
The new study shows the Atlantic’s circulation is weakening, fast.
Scientists estimate it’s losing up to 3 million tonnes of moving water every second over the course of a century. That’s the equivalent of draining all the world’s rivers combined… every few moments.
There were no flashing alarms in the study. Just line after line of data confirming what many oceanographers have feared… the AMOC is not slowing hypothetically, it is slowing right now.
A Turtle, Adrift
The currents that carried our hatchling, and thousands of other marine animals, are becoming unpredictable.
Humpback whales follow these flows to calving grounds. The plankton that generate half our oxygen ride them like highways.
So what happens when the ocean’s GPS stops working?
That’s not just a question for the turtle. That’s a question for us too. This current does more than guide sea creatures.
It keeps crops alive.
It holds coastlines in place.
It governs the rainfall that grows wheat in Europe and rice in West Africa.
If you’ve eaten bread, rice, or fish this week, the ocean helped put it on your plate.
How the System Breaks
The AMOC works on a beautifully simple principle. Warm salty water from the tropics flows north, cools in the North Atlantic, becomes denser, and sinks. That sinking pulls more warm water behind it, driving the whole system.
Now picture Greenland, not as an ice-covered giant, but as a tap, running fast.
In 2019 alone, it shed 532 billion tonnes of ice. That’s enough to raise sea levels by 1.5 millimetres in a single year. Enough to cover the entire UK in two and a half metres of meltwater.
This meltwater is fresh, and fresh water floats. It sits atop the salty sea like oil on water, refusing to mix. It blocks the sinking motion that drives the Atlantic’s circulation.
No sinking, no system.
Oceanographers began seeing the signs a decade ago. Now, the warning lights are blinking red. Just south of Greenland, a strange patch of ocean is cooling, a blue bruise on a warming planet. It's called the North Atlantic Warming Hole, and it’s a known signature of AMOC breakdown.
The latest study analysed 94 climate models. Only the ones that included a weakening Gulf Stream reproduced what we’re now seeing with our own eyes.
The terrifying reality is that Greenland has likely passed a tipping point. Studies show that even if we stopped emissions today, parts of the ice sheet are committed to melt for centuries, raising global seas long after we’re gone.
Signs on the Surface
The collapse is already making an impact.
Fish stocks are vanishing off Newfoundland. Storm paths are shifting.
Rainfall in West Africa is arriving late, or not at all. In the Caribbean, coral reefs are bleaching faster. Heat is pooling in places it never used to stay. Even jellyfish blooms are changing. Predator-prey dynamics are falling out of sync.
Our turtle? She may hatch too early. Or arrive to find her food has already moved on.
The Tipping Point
In 2023, physicists Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen estimated a 95% chance that the AMOC could collapse between 2025 and 2095 under current emissions. Their most likely scenario? Around 2057.
Dr Wei Liu, Associate Professor of Climate Change at UC Riverside, has warned, "If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, this trend is likely to continue."
A collapse wouldn’t be an instant stop. It would be a reorganisation into a new, unstable state, one that could last centuries and reshape global weather permanently.
An Ecological Unravelling
We are dismantling the guidance system that marine life evolved with. Currents that once told grey whales where to go and coral larvae where to settle are being scrambled in real time.
We are the generation whose emissions may halt the ocean’s circulation. That outcome isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice. A deeply human one.
This Deserves Front-Page Headlines
Yet it remains mostly absent from the news cycle.
Why? It isn’t dramatic. It’s just devastating.
AMOC collapse is a scientific story, yes, but also a food security story. A migration story. A trade story. It connects melting ice in Greenland to dry riverbeds in Africa and storm surges in Northern Europe.
By some estimates, it could cost the global economy trillions. If a tech company were collapsing this fast, it would lead the Financial Times.
What You Can Actually Do
Worried? Fund the Gaps
Ocean monitoring systems like the RAPID array and Argo floats are chronically underfunded. Write to your national science funding body (UKRI in the UK). Ask why we aren’t properly tracking the fate of our climate engine.
In Policy, Finance or Infrastructure? Target Your Influence.
If you work in policy, infrastructure, or finance, ask what happens when the ocean turns unreliable. Most adaptation plans still assume the AMOC will hold. Challenge that assumption.
Outraged? Back Legal Action.
Groups like ClientEarth and EarthRights International and Whale and Dolphin Conservation are using legal strategies to hold polluters and governments accountable. Support their work.
Not in government? Speak Plainly.
Insurance. War. Migration. The Gulf Stream doesn’t just power nature. It underwrites civilisation.
Most importantly - Refuse Silence.
Ask your school, workplace, or local MP - “What are you doing about the risk of AMOC collapse?” If they don’t have an answer, demand one.
A Final Thought
In 2012, I helped run a turtle conservation project on a small island in the Seychelles. I still remember the hatchlings.
They’d wobble down the sand under moonlight, no bigger than the phone you’re reading this on, drawn by instinct, by temperature, by tides. They didn’t know where they were going, but the ocean did.
They trusted the ocean.
That trust has been earned over millions of years.
We’re breaking it in less than one hundred.
If this story resonated, feel free to share it with someone who needs to remember the ocean too. You can also subscribe to Ocean Rising to get weekly dispatches from the deep.
– Luke
📌 PS: If this shook you, don’t let it stop here. Repost. Restack. Remind someone that the ocean still turns, for now.
References
IPCC, 2021 – Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (AR6).
Wood et al., 2021 – Ocean forcing drives glacier retreat in Greenland.
Sasgen et al., 2020 – Record Greenland ice loss in 2019 detected by GRACE-FO.
IPCC, 2019 – Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.
Pedersen & Christensen, 2019 – Greenland warming linked to Arctic sea ice loss.
Oppenheimer et al., 2019 – IPCC Report on Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low-Lying Islands and Coasts.
Ruiz-Barradas et al., 2018 – Subsurface North Atlantic cooling and multidecadal variability.
Rahmstorf et al., 2015 – Slowdown in Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
IPCC, 2013 – Summary for Policymakers (AR5).
Guinehut et al., 2012 – High-resolution 3D temperature and salinity fields.
Mulet et al., 2012 – Global estimate of 3D geostrophic ocean circulation.
Kelly, 2004 – Heat transport and surface fluxes in the North Pacific.
Wang et al., 2004 – NAO–SST linkages in the North Atlantic Basin.
Lopez et al., 2025 – Freshening fingerprint of a weakening Atlantic overturning circulation (Nature Communications Earth & Environment).
Just found this article but have been aware from other sources of the huge challenges of changes to the AMOC and the warmer water has on the polar ice-caps. The very recent decision of Iceland to announce a climate emergency is a sign that awareness is on the rise but not nearly enough.
A really powerful article. Thank you for opening our eyes to the truth.