Why a ‘Day After Tomorrow’ ice age isn’t as far fetched as we thought

The oceans crash against skyscrapers, making aquatic tunnels of Manhattan streets. Heavy layers of snow pile on endlessly, burying entire civilizations in canopies of white. Eventually, liquid turns to ice, and life as we know it is threatened by an eternal freeze.

This is the harrowing disaster scenario of The Day After Tomorrow, a 2004 science fiction film directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Based on an imagined future of accelerated global warming, the movie was a major box office hit - it grossed more than US$500 million worldwide - but climatologists quickly took aim at its scientific value.

Patrick Michaels, a noted climate change sceptic, wrote in USA Today after the film’s release, “As a scientist, I bristle when lies dressed up as ‘science’ are used to influence political discourse. . . . Each one of these phenomena is physically impossible.”

He joined a chorus of critics who deemed the film wildly counterfactual. Yahoo! featured The Day After Tomorrow in a top ten list of scientifically inaccurate movies, while Duke University paleoclimatologist William Hyde declared: “This movie is to climate science as Frankenstein is to heart transplant surgery.”

The extreme cooling trends depicted are caused by a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, a North Atlantic ocean water circulation system that moderates temperatures north of the equator. When the movie was released, however, there had yet to be research examining such an event’s potential aftermath.

Now, a University of Southampton climate study published in Nature Scientific Reports indicates that we were naive to feel safe from The Day After Tomorrow-esque realities.

“The basic scenario of the AMOC as a result of global warming is not completely out of the blue or unthinkable,” the study’s author, Sybren Drijfhout, said.