Why the slowing of the world’s fastest ocean current would mean big trouble | It’s part of the scenario in “The Day After Tomorrow,” but scientists split over how fast or calamitously it may occur. A team studying the Florida Current toils to bring clarity.
Source: silence7
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Research by [University of Massachusetts Amherst](https://www.umass.edu/news/article/winter-coming-researchers-uncover-surprising-cause-little-ice-age) scientists provides a new answer to one of the persistent questions in historical climatology, environmental history and the earth sciences: What caused the Little Ice Age? The answer, we now know, is a paradox: warming.
The Little Ice Age was one of the coldest periods of the past 10,000 years, a period of cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region. This cold spell, whose precise timeline scientists debate, but which seems to have set in around 600 years ago, was responsible for crop failures, famines and pandemics throughout Europe, resulting in misery and death for millions.
To date, the mechanisms that led to this harsh climate state have remained inconclusive. Now, [U.S. National Science Foundation](https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1744515&HistoricalAwards=false)-funded research results published in [*Science Advances*](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi8230) give an up-to-date picture of the events that brought about the Little Ice Age. Surprisingly, the cooling appears to have been triggered by an unusually warm episode.
[https://www.nsf.gov/news/winter-coming-researchers-uncover-surprising-cause](https://www.nsf.gov/news/winter-coming-researchers-uncover-surprising-cause)