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Strange Discovery in the Arctic Deep Sea Worries Researchers – “Highly Worrying”

Avatar photoby Leonard Hennersdorf

The northernmost regions of Earth are among the planet’s most crucial areas, with events there having profound impacts on the global climate.

View of the Arctic from above (AI-Generated Image).
© futurezone.de via Midjourney

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When animals wear GPS trackers, scientists gain detailed insight into their movements, behavior, and how they interact with human environments. This data helps protect habitats, reduce conflict, and create smarter conservation strategies for peaceful coexistence.

In the Arctic, a research team made a strange discovery. While analyzing the currents around the ice masses, they found that these are behaving in an unusually odd way. This could have unpredictable consequences for the ice.

Arctic: Currents Threaten Stability

The researchers’ focus is on the North Atlantic gyre, a system of currents stretching across the entire Atlantic. Everywhere outside the Arctic zone, it works as usual. However, in the far north, researchers noticed that their previous data on the currents didn’t add up. The focus is on the stability of the entire system, which hinges on one key factor.

That factor is the circulation of the gyre in the northernmost part of the Atlantic, between Greenland and the North Pole. According to data analyzed since 1950, this circulation has slowed down significantly. The study warns about impacts on the global climate if the rotation of this current system in the high north reaches a critical point. After a certain threshold, the entire North Atlantic gyre could collapse.

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This development is “highly worrying,” as one of the scientists involved, Beatriz Arellano Nava, explained to Live Science in an interview. If the current system collapses in the Arctic, weather patterns would change worldwide. Far more extreme events would become increasingly frequent, particularly in Europe. These would include not only intense heatwaves but also episodes of severe cold or powerful storms.

Up until now, the current was driven by especially cold water masses with high salt content. But with the increasing amount of liquid freshwater in the Arctic, caused by more snowmelt, the makeup of the water is changing dramatically. History highlights the consequences more clearly. The last collapse of the North Atlantic gyre in the 13th century AD triggered the Little Ice Age. Such events can lead to both extreme warming and severe cooling.

Sources: “Recent and early 20th century destabilization of the subpolar North Atlantic recorded in bivalves” (Science Advances, 2025), Live Science

This article was translated with the help of AI and carefully reviewed by our editorial team.