Fossil Geo, now FossilQuest is now uploaded to Google Play Store for testing
It’s been a while since I last posted an update, and I wanted to take a moment to catch up on everything that’s been going on. As you may know, I’ve been working on a new book draft titled ‘The Sentient Threads’, for the past few months, and I’m happy to report that it’s coming along nicely. The writing process has been both exhilarating and exhausting, but I’m really proud of how it’s shaping up. The story is taking on a life of its own, and I can’t wait to share it with you all when it’s ready.
The research showing that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is weakening, with the Gulf Stream drifting northward, is a significant climate event that could lead to severe consequences for Europe and other regions. The article discusses the implications of this finding and its relevance to speculative fiction writing.
However whereas I thought that I was leaning towards the dystopian world view of the AMOC collapse it is now looking like I was someway off as new evidence is making me reconsider. I am therefore coming to the conclusion that the AMOC collapse is more likely than not, and is a pretty big deal, and, among other things, it has made me think about how I want to approach the topic in my writing. I want to make sure that I’m portraying the science accurately while also telling a compelling story. It’s a delicate balance, but I think it’s an important one to strike. In short book two is going to be a lot more dystopian than I had originally planned, and I think that’s a good thing. It will allow me to explore the consequences of climate change in a more realistic way, and hopefully it will also help to raise awareness about the urgent need for action on this issue.
The Atlantic Thermostat Is Breaking — and We Can Watch It From Space
Somewhere off the coast of North Carolina, the ocean is drifting out of position.
It is doing this slowly, a kilometer or two per year’ but the direction is constant and the data is unambiguous: the Gulf Stream, the great river of warm water that runs up the American seaboard before arcing east toward Europe, has moved approximately 53 kilometres northward since 1993. Satellite instruments measuring sea surface height to millimeter precision confirm it. Subsurface temperature records going back to 1965 confirm it independently.
That figure, 53 kilometres, is not a model output. It is a measurement. And what it measures is the early footprint of one of the most consequential climate shifts in modern human history.
What is the AMOC, and why does it matter?
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, usually referred to as the AMOC, is a planetary-scale ocean current system. Warm surface water flows north from the tropics, releasing enormous quantities of heat into the atmosphere as it travels. When it reaches the far North Atlantic, it cools, becomes dense with salt, and sinks — diving to the ocean floor and flowing south again, drawing the next batch of warm water northward. The system delivers roughly 1.3 petawatts of heat to the North Atlantic: approximately 100 times humanity’s entire electricity generation.
That heat is the reason Western Europe is habitable in the way that it is. Edinburgh and Moscow share almost exactly the same latitude. The difference in their winter climates is largely the AMOC. The same is true of much of Britain, Scandinavia, and the Atlantic coast of Europe. The system is, in effect, the continent’s oceanic central heating.
The pump mechanism depends on that sinking step. Dense, cold, salty water sinks. The circulation continues. The heat keeps moving north.
The problem is fresh water.
What is going wrong
Greenland is melting at a rate that has accelerated dramatically over the past three decades. As the ice sheet loses mass, large quantities of fresh water flow into the North Atlantic. Fresh water is less dense than salt water. Less dense water does not sink. The very mechanism that drives the pump — the sinking of cold, salty water — is being progressively undermined by the meltwater produced by the warming that human greenhouse gas emissions have caused.
It is a feedback loop with one direction. The warmer the world gets, the faster Greenland melts, the more fresh water enters the North Atlantic, the weaker the AMOC becomes. Scientists have known this for some time. What has been harder is finding a reliable way to measure the AMOC’s strength directly. Continuous monitoring only began in 2004, which provides relatively limited data for a system operating on century timescales.
The breakthrough from Utrecht University, published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment in March 2026, is that researchers have identified something more directly observable: the position of the Gulf Stream itself.
A signal visible from space
The Gulf Stream, as it runs north along the American coastline, is held in place near Cape Hatteras by a deeper current called the Deep Western Boundary Current — essentially the return flow of the AMOC system. As the AMOC weakens, this anchoring current weakens too. The Gulf Stream is no longer held. It drifts northward.
That drift is now visible in satellite data. High-resolution ocean models developed at Utrecht confirm the mechanism: the drift is not random variation but a systematic response to AMOC weakening. The researchers identified two stages. The first, a gradual northward drift, measurable from space, is what we can already observe. The 53 kilometres since 1993 is Stage One.
Stage Two, in the model, involves an abrupt northward displacement of 219 kilometres occurring within roughly two years, followed by full AMOC collapse within approximately a quarter century. The abrupt jump acts as a natural warning signal: visible from satellites, arriving around 25 years before collapse.
We are currently in Stage One.
How serious is this?
A full AMOC collapse would be among the most significant climate events in the history of human civilisation.
European winter temperatures could fall by ten degrees Celsius or more — not over centuries, but within a generation of collapse. The Mediterranean would face more severe and prolonged drought. The monsoon systems that provide water for agriculture across large parts of Africa and South Asia would weaken significantly. Major fisheries sustained by cold, nutrient-rich upwelling would collapse. Sea levels along the American East Coast would rise further as the current that normally pushes water away from shore weakens.
Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the world’s leading ocean scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, has revised his personal probability estimate for AMOC collapse from roughly five percent to what he now characterises as “more likely than not.” A study published in 2026 found that a collapsed AMOC is effectively permanent for as long as atmospheric CO₂ remains above 350 parts per million. We are currently at approximately 425 parts per million. Recovery, if it is possible at all, requires carbon removal on a scale humanity has not yet seriously attempted.
The ocean, once it stops, does not simply start again when we ask it to.
Why does this moment feel different?
Climate projections have existed for decades. They are contestable in ways that measurements are not. What the Utrecht study has done is convert an invisible process into an observable signal. The 53-kilometre drift is already in the record. Stage Two, when it comes, will also be visible from satellites. There will be no ambiguity about when the Gulf Stream jumps.
That shift from projection to measurement changes the nature of the conversation. It changes what governments and institutions can reasonably claim not to know.
A writer’s note
I have been thinking about this partly as someone who writes speculative fiction. My novel in progress, The Sentient Threads, is set in Edinburgh in 2181. I gave the city a protective dome, weather windows for travel, councils perpetually arguing over energy budgets, the texture of a climate-changed world. What I had not done carefully enough was reckon with what Edinburgh would specifically look like after a century without its oceanic central heating.
Looking at the science now, I find I had written the symptoms without fully naming the cause. The dome, the councils, the cold pressing in from outside — all of it is consistent with post-AMOC Edinburgh. I just hadn’t been explicit enough about what the city had lost, and how long ago it had lost it, and what it costs every year to compensate.
I think this is a version of something many of us do with climate information. We acknowledge the texture of a changed world without quite letting in the specific event that changed it. The Gulf Stream has moved 53 kilometres. That is a particular thing that has happened, not a general trend. It deserves to be understood as particular.
What to read next
If you want to go further into the science, the Utrecht paper is open access:
