Hold On, The Ice Age Could Happen 'The Day After Tomorrow', Study

New technology has made it clear. There could be an event in the world that proves to be doomsday for the earth---just as in the disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow," a 2004 film, according to HNGN.

The movie shows that global warming starts off a devastation of the "Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC)" leading to catastrophes in major cities such as Los Angeles and New York, and freezing the entire Northern Hemisphere.

While climate scientists have dismissed the film so far, now the events are seen as a state-of-the-art climate model, says the University of Southampton.

In order to carry out these findings, one team of researchers used the German climate model ECHAM at the Max-Planck Institute in Hamburg, which showed that if global warming and a collapse of the AMOC happen simultaneously, there will be a "cooling period" for two decades.

"The planet earth recovers from the AMOC collapse in about 40 years when global warming continues at present-day rates, but near the eastern boundary of the North Atlantic (including the British Isles) it takes more than a century before temperature is back to normal," said professor Sybren Drijfhout from Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton.

Scientists found that atmospheric cooling from an "AMOC collapse" is connected with the transfer of heat from the air into the seas. This has been noticed for the past 15 years----and had been witnessed over the climate "hiatus" that took place.

"When a similar cooling or reduced heating is caused by volcanic eruptions or decreasing greenhouse emissions the heat flow is reversed, from the ocean into the atmosphere. A similar reversal of energy flow is also visible at the top of the atmosphere. These very different fingerprints in energy flow between atmospheric radiative forcing and internal ocean circulation processes make it possible to attribute the cause of a climate hiatus period," Drijfhout said.

However, the "climate hiatus" cannot be due to one specific factor alone, but could be a combination of various natural actions. Such as the El Niño, for instance.

"It can be excluded, however, that this hiatus period was solely caused by changes in atmospheric forcing, either due to volcanic eruptions, more aerosols emissions in Asia, or reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Changes in ocean circulation must have played an important role. Natural variations have counteracted the greenhouse effect for a decade or so, but I expect this period is over now," Drijfhout concluded.

The study was published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.