‘The Day After Tomorrow’ Was Actually Sort of Onto Something

At 2:30 a.m. on June 6, 1998, Whitley Strieber awoke to a knock on his hotel door. Strieber, a UFOologist — that is, a scholar of unidentified flying objects and other paranormal phenomena — was in Toronto that night on tour, promoting his latest book, and he groggily got up to let his visitor in, assuming it was room service. It wasn’t.

According to Strieber, he and his nocturnal visitor proceeded to speak on a wide range of topics in his room over the next half hour. Although he never heard from the man again after that night, Strieber took notes during their meeting, during which the visitor tipped him off about “what was then rather obscure climatology,” Strieber told me. Specifically — according to Strieber — the visitor told him about the pending collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, the system sometimes described as the oceanic conveyor belt responsible for influencing the climate of the Northern Hemisphere.

The late-night conversation became the premise of Strieber’s next book, 1999’s The Coming Global Superstorm, which he co-wrote with the paranormal radio show host Art Bell. The scientific community was not exactly impressed by the work: “I think they’d rather forget I even exist,” Strieber told me. (Bell died in 2018.)

But Strieber got the last laugh: The Coming Global Superstorm not only became the premise for The Day After Tomorrow, the 2004 disaster movie in which Dennis Quaid plays an NOAA paleoclimatologist, and New York freezes over and is beset by wolves, but recent modeling also indicates that the AMOC actually is slowing down. In some of the latest worst case scenario models, researchers say it could reach the point of no return, sending it into collapse as soon as this year. Once that happens, researchers predict that “the ice age pattern of a cooling north and warming south would play out again,” and while Northern Europe would bear the brunt of the effects, the Arctic temperatures experienced across North America this week — from a dangerously cold Inauguration Day to a blizzard warning for the Gulf Coast — could become a norm rather than an anomaly.

“I have watched [The Day After Tomorrow] a couple of times over the last few years, and I’m surprised at how the general premise isn’t that bad,” David Thornalley, a paleoceanographer at University College London, told me.

Of course, there is more wrong in The Day After Tomorrow (and The Coming Global Superstorm, for that matter) than there is right: Thornalley added that following an actual AMOC collapse, weather-related changes would take place on a “multi-decadal time scale” rather than in the mere weeks of exaggerated calamity depicted in the film.

Still, The Day After Tomorrow — which predated Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth by two years and was many Americans’ first introduction to the idea of anthropogenic extreme weather — can seem, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient. It anticipated global warming-caused fresh water runoff from Greenland, which is upsetting the salinity of the ocean — essentially making it less dense — and breaking down the warm-and-cold water circulation across the globe that currently keeps our climate stable. With enough fresh water, the planet’s circulatory system could shut down for the first time since the Neanderthals went extinct.

And while Los Angeles isn’t going to be leveled by tornadoes and wolves won’t roam the tundra of Midtown Manhattan, Europe could cool by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which would have disastrous consequences for the continent’s agriculture. Additionally, the sharp temperature disparities between Northern Europe and the Mediterranean region could result in expansive (albeit not global) storms. While the U.S. would likely dodge the worst of an AMOC-induced cooldown, an ensuing sea level rise would impact many of the nation’s populous and iconic seaboard cities.

As shrewd as Day After Tomorrow and its source material might seem now, research into the possibility of an AMOC collapse dates back to the work of oceanographer Henry Stommel, who made the ocean salinity-conveyor belt connection in 1961. “That wasn’t taken very seriously because it wasn’t really an ocean model but just a sort of conceptual view on salt and heat interaction on the density,” Henk Dijkstra, a professor of physical oceanography at Utrecht University and one of the authors of the recent modeling that points toward an impending AMOC collapse, told me.

By 1986, however, the field of paleoclimatology was expanding rapidly. Researchers sampled ice cores collected from places like Greenland, and learned that there had been “very abrupt changes in climate” in the past, Thornalley told me. The Northern Hemisphere “would appear to be switching from a warm climate to a cold climate — flickering back and forth. And [scientists] put two and two together.”

The news was something of a revelation. “We started to develop this paradigm that, yes, we’ve had abrupt climate change in the past, and we think we can relate it to these changes in the Atlantic circulation, and the climate models suggest that, if possible, it could happen in the future,” said Thornalley, who began his PhD the year that Day After Tomorrow was released. The precedent wasn’t exactly reassuring news — the last time the AMOC collapsed, after all, “there were massive ice sheets and wooly mammoths,” Thornalley added. “It’s not a nice world for humans to try and live in.”

Despite the dire warning in the ice cores, an AMOC collapse wasn’t on the public’s radar before its introduction via Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal. That isn’t to say it wasn’t a buzzy topic of discussion in the scientific community (not to mention that of beings who make a habit of dropping in on UFOlogists in the wee hours of the night). “It was really a hot topic” in climate circles, Thornalley confirmed. The film was “very much of its time.”

The Day After Tomorrow’s scientific resonance today, then, is due more to the fact that AMOC modeling has continued to hone in on the theory of a pending collapse with precision than because of any stunning predictive qualities of the movie itself. The scientific community is still in deep debate over the possibilities and potential outcomes and timelines of the process — a new paper out last week even argues that the AMOC hasn’t been declining — but for all the messiness and caveats, Thornalley ultimately lands in a place not so far from Strieber’s own position. “I don’t think we should be happy to wait until we’re really confident because, by then, it’d be too late,” Thornalley told me. “It’d be rubbish if in 30 to 40 years time, [the AMOC has collapsed] and people go, ‘Well why didn’t you warn us about it?’ ‘Oh, because we wanted to make sure we were really, really, really sure.’

Modern modeling of an AMOC collapse circles back to its speculative offshoots in other ways. Dijkstra told me he’s been working recently on models that consider how to encourage AMOC’s recovery, including via the rapid reduction of emissions. But his team has also run experiments that consider climate geoengineering, including “putting aerosols in the stratosphere” and “closing the Bering Straight,” both of which have the potential to limit freshwater from pouring into the Atlantic. “It’s a bit science fiction, but in models you can do everything,” Dijkstra said.

UFOlogists and mainstream scientists don’t often find themselves on the same side. But while many would dismiss Strieber as an environmental conspiracy theorist, the epigraph to The Coming Global Superstorm reads as urgently and poignantly today as it did umpteen AMOC models ago: “May the children of tomorrow look back on our era as the one where the healing of the earth began.”