EPOC is delighted to welcome a new partner – Havstovan, the Faroe Marine Research Institute – to the project team. Made possible by a grant from the EU’s ‘Hop-On Facility’, the Havstovan team will contribute time series data on the main exchanges across the Greenland-Scotland Ridge, as well as investigation of possibilities to close the largest gap in the existing observational system. The aim is to obtain a better understanding of the link between this AMOC chokepoint and other components of the AMOC system.

The Greenland-Scotland Ridge is a submarine ridge system that acts as a partial barrier between the Arctic Mediterranean (Nordic Seas and Arctic Ocean) and the Atlantic Ocean. Across the ridge there is an upper layer inflow of warm and saline Atlantic water to the Arctic Mediterranean, which keeps large areas free of sea ice, helps maintain a mild climate and provides good living conditions for large fisheries resources. Observations indicate that around 30% of this inflow leaves the Arctic Mediterranean as a surface outflow on both sides of Greenland. The remaining 70% is converted into cold and dense ‘overflow’ water that flows from the Arctic Mediterranean into the Atlantic through the deep passages across the ridge. This overflow contributes about one third of the water that ends up flowing southwards through the western Atlantic as the deep limb of the AMOC. The overflow water is considerably denser than any other water mass in the North Atlantic and therefore plays a disproportionally large role in maintaining the density contrast between the upper and deep limbs of the AMOC.