The great ocean conveyor is drawn
Wallace Broecker's article "The Biggest Chill" in Natural History, discussing the Younger Dryas cold reversal, carried a cartoon of the global thermohaline circulation as a single looping belt of warm surface flow and cold deep return. Drawn to explain abrupt climate change to a lay readership, it became the canonical image of the circulation in textbooks and news graphics — and fixed in the public mind a picture of one belt with one engine that the subsequent observational record does not support.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Wallace Broecker · person · United States · not located
- Thermohaline Circulation · natural phenomenon · Global ocean · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
The Biggest Chill
The article in which the "great ocean conveyor" diagram of global thermohaline circulation first appeared, drawn as a cartoon for a lay readership in a discussion of the Younger Dryas. Citation details taken from a Journal of Physical Oceanography review of the conveyor concept read via search summary; the original article was not consulted.
Natural History · 1987-11 · Partly verified
Broecker, W. S., Natural History 97 (1987), pp. 74–82
Recorded on Wallace Broecker
- The great ocean conveyor is drawn
- The Argo design array is completed
- IPCC AR6 assesses AMOC decline as very likely and collapse as unlikely this century
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.