Researchers said that the catastrophic climate events that happened in the 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow can turn into reality. Using the German climate model ECHAM at the Max-Planck Institute in Hamburg reached at the conclusion. In the movie, abrupt collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) led to disaster.

The catastrophic events led to New York being flooded, the northern hemisphere freezing and tornadoes destroyed Los Angeles in the movie. Now, the researchers have raised the same concerns to happen in reality.

Using the model, the researchers’ disovered that if global warming and a collapse of the AMOC took place simultaneously then earth will cool for around two decades. After that, global warming continues to take place as if AMOC has never taken place and the global average temperature would offset at around 0.8 degrees Celsius.

“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 Department at the University of Southampton.

The researchers said that the collapse of the AMOC is linked with the atmospheric cooling and heat flow from the atmosphere into ocean.

Professor Sybren said: “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.”