Several things happened that increased our interest in climate change in 1975. However, for the world at large it was business as usual with wars in diverse places. Elsewhere, the Altair 8000 Computer sparked the PC revolution with 8” floppy disks. Humans successfully predicted the Haicheng earthquake, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show arrived in our lives that year. Oh yes, there was one more thing. Wallace Broecker discovered the power of the ocean conveyor belt.
Fractal Mathematics and The Ocean Conveyor Belt
1975 was also a year where we became more aware of the perpetual motion around us. The global population touched four billion although this hardly rippled the news. Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot devised the term ‘fractal’ to describe expanding symmetry in nature and mathematics.
However, Wallace Broeker stood out above the rest with his 1975 discovery of the ocean conveyor belt. In the course of explaining this, he became the first person to put global warming in the public domain. The Earth Institute at Columbia University describes him as “arguably one of the world’s greatest living Geo-scientists, for pioneering work in radiocarbon and isotope dating.”
Broeker’s Ocean Conveyor Belt and Global Warming
The global ocean conveyor belt is a “constantly moving system of deep-ocean circulation driven by temperature and salinity,” as described by the U.S. National Ocean Service. Its headwaters are in the Norwegian Sea where warm Gulf Stream air heats the cold northern latitudes. In return, the water becomes denser, sinking to the bottom of the ocean. This draws more warm water in to replace it. As the cold water returns to the surface, the giant pump continues to encircle the globe.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the U.S. believes global warming could melt glaciers and sea ice. This influx of warm freshwater onto the sea surface “could block the formation of sea ice, disrupting the sinking of cold, salty water.” This sequence of events could slow or even stop thermohaline circulation as scientists call it, which could result in potentially drastic temperature changes in Europe.
No Man is an Island, Wrote John Donne in 1624
This quote from John Donne’s Meditations has become an eerie warning we should all heed. “’No man is an island, entire of itself;” he wrote 394 years ago. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the mainland; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
“As well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee….”
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Preview Image: The Ocean Conveyor Belt
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