Study - Gulf Stream Flow Down About 10% During "Little Ice Age" - Reuters

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OSLO - The Gulf Stream carrying warm water to the North Atlantic slowed about 10 percent in the Little Ice Age from 1200 to 1850, said a US study published on Wednesday that may give clues to the effects of modern global warming.

The report suggested natural shifts in the current might have affected climate in past centuries. The Gulf Stream carries waters from the Gulf of Mexico and boosts temperatures in northern Europe by between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius (9 and 18 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with similar latitudes in Siberia. Driven by winds and the earth's rotation and pushing heat towards the poles, the warmth it carries is equivalent to 2,000 times the electricity generating capacity of the United States.

"The strength of the Gulf Stream was about 10 percent weaker during the Little Ice Age," David Lund, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Reuters.

He and two colleagues studied sediment cores off Florida and the Bahamas, and found evidence of a weaker flow that may have contributed to the Little Ice Age from about 1200-1850, when Alpine glaciers grew and London's Thames River froze. "The possibility of abrupt changes in Gulf Stream heat transport is one of the key uncertainties in predictions of climate change for the coming centuries," the scientists wrote in the journal Nature.

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