Thursday, September 24th, 2009, At Sea

It dawned a cloudy, dull and cold morning. As it was much too raw to enjoy being outside on the decks for anything more than our morning exercise, I spent most of the day catching up with my journal. Ultimately I spent about 2 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the afternoon on it, getting so involved that I skipped dinner in the process.

I did take a break to attend a lecture on global ocean currents. The impact of global warming interfering with the normal circulation is very clear-cut and much scarier than I had even imagined. I did not, for example, realize that the sinking of salty water in the North Atlantic off Greenland had effectively stopped, nor had I realized that the flow volume of the basic Gulfstram and North Atlantic Drift was now down by about 25-30%, nor did I realize that the historical record from the Greenland ice sheet cores indicated that the ocean circulation system could shut off completely in as little as three years' time. Hoo, boy, does all that have some dangerous implications for the next few years! It looks like it may get interesting, but I have heard that an ancient Chinese curse is "May you live in interesting times!".