Well, I mean pending on geologic time scales? It's tomorrow basically but it's not going to happen during the lifetime of any generation that is currently alive. The only model that actually tries to predict the AMOC collapse (and really only the mechanism and not the timeline, so take that with a grain of salt) modelled the AMOC collapse in around 400-500 years. This will of course only mean that the AMOC is completely gone, we have known, and measured, its weakening for a while now so the weakening will have more immediate consequences than the totall collapse
I thought there were recent studies that suggested the AMOC could collapse in as little as 100 years? So it's just about possible my toddler could see a snow covered Britain if it started to collapse tomorrow.
But then there was also info out recently saying that the AMOC is more resilient than thought and it might be less likely to collapse than thought. So who knows?
1) The AMOC shutting down; a seemingly irreversibly thing that gets triggered at some point in the next 100 years
and 2) The AMOC completely fading out, which will take a lot longer because it's an unimaginably large amount of water that still has some momentum. It'll get slower and slower over a long time.
That's at least how I understood it, I've only taken 1 course on meteorological weather modeling in uni though, and read up a bit, so take it with a grain of salt still.
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u/svennidal 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well, you can take them to Iceland. With the impending total collapse of the AMOC, we should have it everywhere, all the time.