The Agulhas Leakage

Image from NOAA showing Agulhas leakage.

I know I have made a ridiculous number of posts this month, but I have been doing a lot of reading/ and thinking, and have even been catching up on a few subjects that I've been meaning to write about for a while, but didn't have time to.
Anyway something interesting I read in the Book Atlantic by Simon Winchester, was about a thing called the Agulhas leakage. I had never heard of it before, and so I did some searching around on the Internet to learn more. Basically it is warm water from the Indian Ocean that is curling past the tip of South Africa, and entering the Atlantic.
But a little bit of history is needed to really understand why it is referred to as a leakage versus a current.
In the southern hemisphere between the latitudes of 30 and 60 degrees are winds called the "westerlies". (And big surprise they blow from the west!) Anyway, the strength of these winds has declined over the last 30 years and no one really knows why. Some folks think they are moving farther south and filling in where there hole in the ozone was created, but it's still pretty inconclusive at this point. The thing is that the westerlies used to keep the water from the Indian Ocean out of the Atlantic. But with the weakening of the winds, that is no longer the case, and so the warm and extra salty waters are seeping in, and slowly making their way up the west coast of Africa.
No one knows really what the effects of this will be, but since the oceans of the world are run on very strange and sensitive relationships between temperature, salinity and weather, the consequences could be anywhere from negligent to quite severe. I read the abstract of an article published in Nature that links the leakage with the change in the winds, and they say that should the Gulf Stream shut down, the Aguihas leakage could provide Great Britain with an alternative source of warmth.