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In The Day After Tomorrow, the warming of the planet causes the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the formal name for the overall system of Atlantic Ocean currents, to effectively collapse—inducing a new ice age upon the planet.
The writers of the movie may have taken dramatic liberties with climatological research to imagine such an outcome—after all, they had to find a reason for Dennis Quaid to make a dangerous trek across a newly formed glacier around New York City to save Jake Gyllenhaal.
But the collapse of AMOC isn’t impossible. In fact, we’re rapidly reaching a tipping point, thanks to climate change, according to a new study published Tuesday in Nature Communications that predicts it could collapse by the middle of the century, possibly even as early as 2025.