EPOC is a European AMOC research project. We study the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation: how it works, how it has changed, and what its future holds. Institutions across Europe and North America are combining observations, palaeoclimate records, and climate models to resolve long-standing uncertainties about AMOC behaviour and its links to weather, sea level rise, ecosystems, carbon uptake, and climate change.
The AMOC, or Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, is a large-scale circulation pattern in the ocean. It regulates heat and rainfall across Europe and beyond. EPOC is working to understand how climate change will affect it.
We examine what the latest science says about AMOC collapse risk, separating near-term plausible risks from extreme scenarios that go beyond current evidence, and explaining why accurate communication matters.
Is the AMOC approaching a tipping point? EPOC scientists examine the modelling evidence and what it does — and does not — tell us about the risk of an abrupt shutdown.
How do scientists know how the ocean and climate has varied in the distant past when observations only go back 70 years or so? The answer is in the mud at the bottom of the ocean.
As part of the annual Fram Strait 2025 cruise conducted by the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI), the science team from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre deployed a new suite of autonomous Lab-on-Chip (LoC) sensors on long-term moorings in the East Greenland Current.
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 German research vessel Meteor has set sail from Ponta Delgada in the Azores on its expedition to Flemish Cap and Grand Banks in the NW Atlantic. Here, over a period of 4 weeks, the team on board will make new observations of the dynamic oceanographic conditions in this region.
As many people around Europe start to wind down for the summer holidays, the EPOC science teams are gearing up for the research cruise season. Three expeditions are on the calendar for the July – October period, starting with a month-long mission to the Flemish Cap region of the NW Atlantic, setting sail in late July.