(14) ___________

“What happens when you suddenly drain these massive amounts of fresh water into the ocean? It’s going to change ocean circulation,” says co-author Torbjorn Tornqvist, an Earth scientist at Tulane University in Louisiana. Today, rapid melting from the Greenland ice sheet would send massive amounts of fresh water into the North Atlantic Ocean, changing the marine environment. “But it will also lead to potentially higher precipitation rates in the same region, which could also lead to fresher surface waters in the North Atlantic,” Tornqvist says. “So we need to understand whether those types of changes could potentially be capable of triggering these kinds of abrupt climate events.”