In a paper in Nature this week, scientists
present palaeo - oceanographic evidence that deep convection of surface waters in the North Atlantic — the engine that keeps the AMOC in constant motion — began to decline as early as around 1850, probably owing to increased freshwater influx from Arctic ice that had melted at the end of a relatively cold period called the Little Ice Age (D. J. R. Thornalley et al..
Abrupt tropical cooling ~ 8,000 years ago «We drilled a sequence of exceptionally large, well - preserved Porites corals within an uplifted
palaeo - reef in Alor, Indonesia, with Th - 230 ages spanning the period 8400 to 7600 calendar years before
present (Figure 2).