Deep in the Atlantic, a vast circulation of water carries heat from the tropics towards Greenland. This is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or Amoc. It does this work largely out of sight, so doesn’t have the public profile of rainforests, polar ice caps or other huge climate-regulating systems.
Recent studies suggest it is weakening. If it slows further, northern Europe could experience much colder winters even as the world warms, while tropical monsoons could shift, and sea levels could suddenly rise along the US east coast.
Yet despite repeated scientific warnings, Amoc rarely remains in the headlines for long. One explanation involves media ownership and editorial constraints, but there is another. Amoc presents a particular problem for modern journalism: it is extraordinarily difficult for many to even imagine, as it exists in a world far below our own – moving slowly, silently through the Atlantic.
Images help shape how people understand climate issues. In journalism, over decades, a visual culture has evolved: burning forests, calving icebergs, oil rigs at sunset, swirling hurricanes, beaches strewn with plastic bottles. These visuals act as stand-ins for systems that are hard or impossible to observe directly. Climate journalism did not create this visual filter, but it has to operate within it.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch illustrates how the filter works. Often imagined as a floating island of waste, in reality it is a diffuse soup of microplastics spread across millions of square kilometres of ocean, largely invisible at sea level.
It circulates in news coverage partly because visual proxies give it a recognisable form – discarded bottles and nets pulled from the ocean, an endurance swimmer collecting data during a long journey. These images allow the garbage patch to continually stay in mainstream news even if it simplifies and distorts what is happening in the ocean.
Naja Bertolt Jensen / unsplash, CC BY-SA
When systems have no image
Amoc operates on a slow but immense scale. Warm surface waters move north from the tropics toward Greenland, where they cool, become denser, sink to depths of around 5,000 metres, and return south at depth. Hundreds of kilometres wide in places, it redistributes heat and salinity across the Atlantic on a massive scale.
Many dynamic processes shape this ocean current, so we still don’t know exactly how fast the circulation will change or even its future trajectory. Predicted outcomes remain uncertain and some scientists are more hopeful than others, but multiple studies indicate a weakening trend.
Yet Amoc generates few visuals. Researchers can observe its traces: long-dead coral carrying chemical echoes of past waters, layers of sediment slowly accumulating a record of currents, or through instruments timestamping the faintest deep-sea movements. These fragments are assembled into patterns through computer models that reconstruct circulation and can animate it in three dimensions. Satellites offer some surface clues of temperature, height and salinity. But the results of this work are generally designed for scientific analysis, not news coverage or public understanding.
How to illustrate the invisible
So is the answer to find more dramatic images – and do any actually exist? The UK’s Met Office and Nasa often fall back on red-and-blue diagrams of arrows looping around the Atlantic. For some people it works: Vicky Allan, a Scottish-based environmental journalist who has reported on Amoc in detail, told me that what finally hit home was a lecture slide showing a cold “blue blob” over Scotland, a collapse scenario projecting winters of -30°C.
Met Office / Youtube, CC BY-SA
But images do not carry universal meaning. We interpret the world through direct experience, knowledge, and cultural memory. Allan lives in the region depicted. For others, the same image may not have the same impact.
Beyond these diagrams, Amoc offers almost no visual proxies. It’s sometimes illustrated with “frozen Europe” visuals, but most scientists say such a doomsday scenario is unlikely. If journalists lean into frozen Europe too much, the science itself risks being adapted to fit an engagement-friendly visual convention.
When complex, invisible systems appear in mainstream news, dramatic images often travel further than the story itself. I found this with my own work on satellites burning up in the atmosphere: striking visuals draw attention and help readers imagine how spacecraft end their working lives. But my core message about the still-uncertain effect of microscopic particles on ozone-depleting polar clouds was much harder to convey.
From the deep ocean to the upper atmosphere, some of the most consequential environmental processes unfold beyond human perception, across timescales from decades to millennia. They belong to a planet far more complex than we can fully grasp, where uncertainty is not a failure, but part of how we learn about the climate system.
Yet climate journalism relies on a narrow visual filter: images that are urgent, dramatic and human-centred, reducing vast slow environmental processes into events that can be seen and felt. In doing so, we risk mistaking attention for understanding. Amoc and similar critical systems reveal the gap between what matters and what becomes visible. The challenge is not scientific complexity, but the limits of the visual conventions through which we tell environmental stories.
