At www.q-mag.org/mega-streams-of-the-atlantic.html … we have something that I've not seen anywhere else – somebody questioning the idea of the ocean circulation system, or how it actually works. Between Greenland and Norway an enormous mass of water, according to mainstream, plunges down into the deep of the Atlantic, and travels south along the bottom of the ocean, eventually reaching the tropics once again, where it originated as the Gulf Stream, a huge mass of warm water that provides north west Europe with an exotic marine life that has been exploited over centuries. In combination with the Westerly wind system this has provided western Europe with a more agreeable climate than the eastern seaboard of N America (or rather, is responsible for all the rain we get). For example, the solar vortex is a rarity as far as the British Isles are concerned – although the occasional blast from the Arctic hits when the Westerlies are in a lull, and the meandering Jet Stream can cause snow storms (cold air meeting the warm air of the Westerlies).
The idea of the ocean circulation system is that warm tropical water is circulated all around the world's oceans, and water with an origin in the tropical Pacific can eventually find its way as far as the North Atlantic – and even enters the Arctic Ocean. This, in some quarters, is blamed for the melting sea ice in the Arctic, last year, and three years ago, having taken that long to traverse the world's oceans. On that basis how much water actually downwells in the North Atlantic in order to create a reverse flow along the ocean bottom. It could just as easily traverse the Arctic Ocean and re-emerge in the Pacific via the Bering Strait (but by that time would be far from warm). Hence, does this piece draw attention to fact over theory?
Ann Marie de Grazia translated the article from Der Spiegel but the ocean circulation system is an accepted piece of science that is embedded into a wider series of mainstream assumptions and one of these is that when a problem is introduced to the system it reacts in a certain way. For example, an infusion of non-salty fresh water into the Atlantic causes the circulation system to go into reverse – sometimes for a long time (the Ice Ages) and sometimes for a short time (at around 6000, 3000 and 2300BC). In other words, at those points in time NW Europe cooled rapidly and no explanation was forthcoming until somebody somewhere blamed the ocean circulation system. You either accept it, and therefore believe science has found the answer, or you keep your mouth shut because there is no alternative explanation. What the author of the Der Spiegel piece is saying is that nobody has actually observed the downwelling of a great mass of water anywhere in the North Atlantic. They have observed some downwelling – but it is only paltry in volume and nowhere near the amount required of the theory.