Science:
It was an ominous if subtle shift in the far North Atlantic.
For 30 years, waters off southern Greenland and Iceland had
been growing less and less salty, oceanographers reported in
late 2003. It looked as if global warming could be freshening
high-latitude Atlantic waters (Science, 2 January 2004, p. 35).
If the trend continued, they worried, it could throw a monkey
wrench into the "conveyor belt" of currents that warms the far
North Atlantic, as is wildly overdone in the movie
The Day After Tomorrow. New analyses have now shown
that global warming is indeed messing with the Atlantic's
salinity, although not as dramatically as Hollywood
envisioned.
