Ocean Currents & Climate Change

What A Message In A Bottle Can Teach About Global Warming

(CBS)  “Everywhere you look there's a puzzle, everywhere you look there's beauty,” says Eddy Carmack.

Carmack has been bringing that curiosity to the Arctic nearly every year since 1969. He's had close encounters with polar bears and taken icebreaking trips to the North Pole. Carmack's an expert in ocean currents and he's got a simple message: what happens here affects climate everywhere.

Even for Carmack, explaining the complexities of climate change could take a lifetime. But in the short time we had, we took him by helicopter to an ice floe off the coast of Greenland to get an idea of what's at stake.

“We're standing on a river of ice, that's streaming out of the arctic,” he explains. “When it reaches the north Atlantic it's going to melt. It'll make the waters there fresher and lighter and affect the whole ocean circulation.”

And as the temperature of Arctic water increases, Carmack says it can lead to more extreme weather around the planet, since oceans act as the earth's heating and cooling system.

Carmack says it's not a stretch, long term, to say that what's happening in the Arctic could have an impact on everything from hurricane patterns and strengths to drought in the West.

The Arctic Ocean was once thought to be isolated from the rest of the world's waterways. But scientists now know that it's intricately connected to both the Pacific and the Atlantic. And that even minor changes here can affect those oceans as well.

The Arctic waters don't flow in a perfect shape, but rather zig and zag within our neighboring oceans through various "gateways." So as these waters warm, the effects for both climate and wildlife can transfer to the rest of the world. Carmack uses what he calls "folk science" to demonstrate this and to get school kids interested.

Bottles containing a short message from elementary students and Carmack's contact information are dropped each time the ship stops to collect data.

To date, about 4,000 of the bottles have been tossed over; about 150 have been found.

On average, the bottles take about two years to be found. And the places they show up might surprise you: from Norway to Alaska, France -- even Brazil. Unsuspecting citizens have become lab assistants in a global study.

A simple experiment that proves a serious concept: the Arctic Ocean is far from isolated, and that as these waters travel downstream, they carry consequences for all of us, proving our vital connection to the top of our world.