“Whoever said ‘Tomorrow is another day’… didn’t check the weather,” dramatically proclaims the poster for the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow. The film is a dark vision of what could happen if global warming got so out of control that catastrophic storms began plaguing the planet. The secondary cause of the severe weather in The Day After Tomorrow is the shutting down of the Atlantic Ocean conveyor due to a rush of freshwater created by melting polar ice caps. In his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore also notes that the Atlantic Ocean conveyor ceasing to turn could be a frightening consequence of global warming.

But what, exactly, is the ocean conveyor in the first place? How does it work? Could it really shut down as quickly as it does in The Day After Tomorrow, or by the means described in An Inconvenient Truth? If the conveyor did stop working, what would happen to Europe? Click around our site to find out.