Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and climate tipping points
Freshening and warming of the North Atlantic can weaken deep-water formation and the salt-advection feedback that sustains the circulation.
Explore this system in the interactive atlasWhy it matters
What could change
Large shifts in North Atlantic climate, rainfall belts, regional sea level, marine ecosystems, and heat transport.
Scientific caution
What remains uncertain
A twenty-first-century collapse is not the consensus projection, and proposed early-warning methods remain actively debated.
Tipping element and tipping point
The tipping element is the part of the climate system described on this page. A tipping point is a critical threshold at which that system could begin moving toward a fundamentally different state. The evidence does not imply a simple, instantaneous planetary switch.
Continuously checked
Newest research on AMOC
Recent journal metadata is matched automatically to this system and kept separate from the selected studies below.
New research
Live journal metadata from Crossref
Selected scholarship
Key studies
Peer-reviewed work chosen for enduring relevance and influence.
Physics-based early warning signal shows that AMOC is on tipping course
van Westen, Kliphuis & Dijkstra · Science Advances
A freshwater-forced climate-model experiment develops a physics-based indicator that strengthens before simulated collapse.Climate tipping point interactions and cascades: a review
Wunderling et al. · Earth System Dynamics
Maps the evidence for stabilizing, destabilizing, and still-uncertain links among tipping elements.Possible interactions
Connected tipping elements
These links represent potential interactions, not certain or equally strong causal relationships.
Greenland Ice Sheet
As the ice sheet loses height, its surface encounters warmer air, amplifying melt and potentially committing Greenland to long-term disintegration.
MediatorArctic Winter Sea Ice
Summer sea ice is not generally expected to tip under anthropogenic forcing, but winter ice may have multiple states and sea-ice loss can amplify other transitions.
BiosphereAmazon Rainforest
Warming, drought, fire, and deforestation can reinforce one another, reducing rainfall and shifting forest toward degraded or open states.
CirculationWest African Monsoon
Land-ocean temperature contrasts and feedbacks may reorganize Sahel rainfall, but models disagree on whether change would be abrupt and in which direction.
MediatorEl Niño–Southern Oscillation
ENSO is a powerful source of global climate variability that can transmit and intensify stress across rainforests, monsoons, coral reefs, and polar ice.