What would happen...

Mr Benevolent

...if the Gulf Stream were to shut down?

I've just been watching that truly awful and horribly unrealistic movie 'The Day After Tomorrow'. I'm wondering how long it would realistically take for the weather to change if the Gulf Stream did stop? Is it even possible for the Gulf Stream to shut down?

arctictree

I thought our weather was due to the predominantly westerly winds coming over a large expanse of water and not the gulf stream? We all saw what happened over the last few weeks when the winds came from the east instead.

mike65

Well it wouldn't just stop like a moving walkway, it would become weaker. I guess it would take a few years. Could it happen? No-one knows for sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation

Snowbie

Apparently the North Atlantic Current (NAC) did slow in 2005

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulation

Danno

What would happen is...

only a handful of Irish people would survive [all of them from Laois] the iminent cooling as we cross the Straits of Gibralter in to a new life in Africa...
...the man would still kiss the girl and live happily ever after! :P


Really though, without the gulf stream we would have a climate more like the Newfoundland or Northern Japan.

Gonzo

Ok this is something stupid that ive always thought of...... what would it be like if the golf stream is still where it is but if the Irish Sea did not exist and there was land all the way from Galway to London.... What if any effect would that have on us in the east of Ireland if there was no Irish Sea and Dublin was a large city well inland about 60km from the welsh border.

Im thinking it mite make things a lil warmer in the summer perhaps and a chance of colder nights in winter, but would we see more snow???

Hal1

Gonzo wrote: »

Ok this is something stupid that ive always thought of...... what would it be like if the golf stream is still where it is but if the Irish Sea did not exist and there was land all the way from Galway to London.... What if any effect would that have on us in the east of Ireland if there was no Irish Sea and Dublin was a large city well inland about 60km from the welsh border.

Im thinking it mite make things a lil warmer in the summer perhaps and a chance of colder nights in winter, but would we see more snow???

Ah welsh TS's imports. :rolleyes: <--hes looking at clouds btw.

arctictree

Gonzo wrote: »

Ok this is something stupid that ive always thought of...... what would it be like if the golf stream is still where it is but if the Irish Sea did not exist and there was land all the way from Galway to London.... What if any effect would that have on us in the east of Ireland if there was no Irish Sea and Dublin was a large city well inland about 60km from the welsh border.

Im thinking it mite make things a lil warmer in the summer perhaps and a chance of colder nights in winter, but would we see more snow???

Ha, if that was the case, I doubt if Dublin would even exist - wasn't it a Viking settlement?!

BTW - I think this was the case about 10,000 years ago.

Danno

We'd have a sub-continental climate akin to Spain, but being further north we'd have colder winters and less hot summers.

Mr Benevolent

arctictree wrote: »

I think this was the case about 10,000 years ago.

Nah, it was a landbridge from Ireland to the UK. Even that's debatable and was probably made up by archeologists who had no other way of explaining migration.