New Scientist’s The Climate Disaster That May Have Already Begun has reached over 2 million views in its first week. Written and presented by Dr Russell Arnott (Seascape Consultants, EPOC), the video was filmed at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Southampton, an EPOC partner institution, and is supported by an interview with Dr Ben Moat, Principal Investigator of the RAPID array.
Popular science coverage of the AMOC sits under real pressure; the subject is clearly newsworthy, and audiences respond to dramatic framing. But an ocean circulation system spanning the entire Atlantic basin does not change on the timescale of a news cycle, and coverage that implies otherwise risks distorting public understanding of a system EPOC exists to explain accurately.
Arnott’s work within EPOC’s stakeholder engagement team, including the project’s own case study on the AMOC in the public spotlight, directly informed how the script handled this tension. The video was able to maintain the newsworthy hook (an ocean system big enough to reshape European winters) while building in the caveats a general audience rarely gets: that abrupt collapse scenarios are a small part of a wide range of possible outcomes, and that current observations do not support a sudden shift.
Ben Moat’s own contribution reinforced this balance directly. Interviewed on camera, he was blunt about the physical limits of the more cinematic scenarios: change on the scale depicted in the film The Day After Tomorrow, he said, “will not happen at all.”
The video was shot in NOC’s mooring workshop, among the instruments used across the RAPID array, the 26°N observing system that has measured AMOC strength continuously since 2004. Placing that equipment on screen gives viewers a direct link between an abstract climate system and the physical instruments that let scientists observe it.
The equipment on screen includes subsurface buoys and an SBE MicroCAT, the temperature-salinity-pressure sensor deployed across the array’s moorings for two years at depths of 1000+ metres before recovery and data download. This is the same class of infrastructure and the same long-term observational approach that underpins much of EPOC’s own work on AMOC variability.
The video also debuts new animations of the AMOC and the broader thermohaline circulation rendered on an ocean-centric Spilhaus projection, a map projection that reframes the world’s oceans as a single connected body of water rather than separating them by continent. For a system whose entire scientific significance lies in connecting the Atlantic to the Arctic, the Southern Ocean and the wider global circulation, an ocean-centric projection makes that connectivity visible in a way conventional map projections cannot.
Reach of this scale is rare for ocean science communication, especially around a topic as complex and contested as AMOC. It demonstrates that scientific rigour and “click-bait” style framing are not mutually exclusive if used effectively, so one does not undermine the other.