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The human race is under attack
from the most devastating weather disaster
to ever strike the modern world.
- The magnitude of something like this is a game-changer
for the entire planet.
Blizzards, hurricanes, wildfires,
massive floods, hellish destruction
that can only be caused by one phenomenon,
the shutdown of the world's ocean currents.
- You screw with an ocean weather system,
the climate goes out of control.
- It is the end of the world as we know it.
Will you be ready...
when doomsday strikes?
Can any of us survive?
Ocean currents control our climate
by transferring heat and moisture from the water
into our atmosphere,
thereby influencing temperatures around the world.
12,000 years ago,
as the last ice age was ending,
the global ocean currents shut down,
and much of the world slipped back
into a deep freeze
that lasted for over a thousand years.
If the ocean currents shut down today,
what would happen to our planet?
Could we survive?
- This isn't some far-flung fictional thing.
This is the beginning of a global climactic shift
that is almost too much to survive.
It'll be a very slow, painful, horrible death.
- It's not a question of if it will happen.
It's almost certainly a question of when.
Boston's Fenway Park.
Red Sox fans are enjoying the game...
when suddenly...
the oldest ballpark in the U.S.
is hit with a deluge of water.
- This is beyond bad weather.
Boston will be wiped off the map.
The entire eastern seaboard is going to drown.
The destruction in Boston
is the result of a catastrophe
scarier than anything mankind has ever faced,
one that begins decades earlier.
In 2015, scientists discover
that something disastrous is happening
to the system of ocean currents
known as the global ocean conveyor belt.
- The global ocean conveyor belt
is the circulation system of the Earth's oceans.
The main driver of the global ocean
conveyor belt happens in the north Atlantic.
Like a giant factory conveyor belt,
warm water moves from the tropical equator
to the northern Atlantic Ocean,
where it turns cold, salty, and dense.
This denser water then sinks
and flows south along the sea floor,
enabling the warmer water to continually flow
above it from the tropics.
The cold water travels through all the world's oceans
until it mixes with warmer water
and returns to the north Atlantic
to repeat the cycle.
- Like the blood vessels in your body
that transport nutrients all throughout your system,
large currents transport energy
and heat all throughout the ocean.
The ocean currents are vitally important
because they distribute heat that affects the climate
around the world.
- 700 light bulbs per person per year
could be continuously lit
by just that amount of heat transported by the ocean.
♪ ♪
But now, an international
scientific expedition
makes a startling discovery in the north Atlantic.
Because of global warming,
melting ice in Greenland
has flooded the surface of the ocean with fresh water,
diluting its saltiness so it doesn't sink anymore.
Without the motion of this sinking water,
the conveyor belt has stopped completely.
- The oceans drive weather systems.
You screw with an ocean weather system,
the climate goes out of control,
and then it kills you.
And this unleashes a chain of disasters,
a domino effect.
Some will strike quickly.
Others will take years,
even decades to unfold.
- You would think you're just flooding the north Atlantic
with a little fresh water, no big deal,
but a very delicate web that's been woven,
and breaking one strand
could have a catastrophic effect
across the globe.
At first nobody notices the effects
of the ocean current shutdown.
Life goes on as normal.
But six months later the disaster surfaces.
People in northern Europe
are the first to suffer the wrath.
They typically live in a mild climate year-round
thanks to the heat released
from warm surface currents in the Atlantic,
but without this hot air,
a cold Arctic blast assaults the region.
- You'll have much colder wind
dropping down from northern latitudes,
and the climate will begin shifting dramatically,
especially in Europe.
- Without warm water continuously flowing
into northern Europe,
temperatures will begin to drop.
The effects of the deep freeze
quickly ripple around the world.
A cargo ship from New York is headed for Hamburg, Germany,
the second-largest port in Europe,
but the harbor is iced in.
The head of the Port Authority
orders icebreakers to free up the ships.
This is the worst winter he and people
across the northern hemisphere have ever experienced.
Intense blizzards bring hurricane-force winds
and mountains of snow.
- The snowstorms would be dropping feet of snow an hour,
and the general temperatures
being around 27 degrees Fahrenheit,
that will freeze very fast and very hard.
A tourist heading for Paris
is caught off guard by sudden whiteout conditions.
Emergency services can't get through the snow
to help him or dozens of other trapped victims.
Now the cold
becomes a killer.
- Hypothermia's terrifying.
It's when your core temperature gets too low
for your body to sustain itself.
Your muscles start to cramp.
You start to get labored breathing.
You will actually run a fever
as your body is trying to keep your body alive,
and then your core temperature will crash.
Your body is shutting down 'cause it's too cold,
and you will literally freeze to death.
Northern Europe is doomed to remain
in a deep freeze,
and the death toll will continue to rise.
Meanwhile, the climate disaster spreads
across the Atlantic to the U.S.
In Massachusetts Bay,
freezing air rushing down from the north Atlantic
stirs up a major storm front.
A family of lobstermen
is headed out to sea when they get the alert.
100 miles wide,
85-mile-an-hour winds,
it's a Nor'easter unlike anything
the lobstermen have ever experienced.
Normally they hit between autumn and early spring,
but this Nor'easter comes in the middle of summer.
- We would be having increased frequency
and intensity of Nor'easters affecting us here in Boston...
and those would be occurring with much greater strength.
The super storm sweeps through Boston,
inundating the city with 15 feet of icy seawater.
It swamps the subways
and turns streets into rivers.
Thousands escape the flooding
by moving to higher ground,
but some people in Boston are all but helpless
as they're dragged to their deaths.
- It's a huge, terrifying catastrophe.
You have the complete collapse of a society
on both a local and global scale.
From Boston to northern Europe,
as images of the catastrophe spread,
people around the world brace themselves for the worst
by fortifying shelters
and stockpiling food, water,
and other essential supplies,
but will it be enough?
Can anyone on Earth
survive the deadliest disaster
in human history?
Global ocean currents,
which regulate heat and rainfall around the world,
have shut down,
unleashing violent changes in the weather
on both sides of the Atlantic.
Frigid temperatures paralyze much of the northeastern U.S.
In Boston, freak storms flood the city,
leaving tens of thousands homeless
and many more dead.
Meanwhile in Europe,
the area first affected by the ocean current shutdown,
death by hypothermia is becoming a daily event.
As the crisis deepens, what will happen to humanity?
Can we survive?
A year into this catastrophic new weather pattern,
the people of New York City now face the wrath.
Off the coast, a massive cyclone,
twice the size and strength of 2012's Hurricane Sandy,
roars inland.
Monster winds and waves slam into the Statue of Liberty
and then barrel towards shore.
- A storm twice as powerful as Sandy
is not even conceivable.
This is destruction on a massive scale.
30-foot waves and 100-mile-per-hour winds
explode through windows and doors,
tearing buildings apart at the seams
and dragging people deeper underwater.
- You have rain, wind, chaos, panic,
and disorder all assaulting a city at once.
It would be panic in the streets.
Some people will be able to survive,
but unless you have the resources
and you have the wherewithal, you won't.
The best thing to do would be to get out.
And while the northeastern U.S.
is battered by super storms,
the apocalyptic effects of this disaster
start traveling south.
The next target is Brazil.
Locals are enjoying the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema
when suddenly the weather turns violent.
Monsoons and 75-mile-per-hour winds
rage ashore.
As the storm surges through the city of Rio de Janeiro,
it becomes a death trap for locals and tourists
who are violently pulled under the swift-moving water.
And as people flee for higher ground,
they face another killer.
Storm water rapidly collects
on the steep slope of the Serrana Mountains.
The water-soaked ground loosens,
creating an 80-foot swell of mud, rocks, and water.
The landslide flattens the shanty slums
that cling to the mountainside.
Thousands of people are buried alive.
As the climate catastrophe ripples around the world,
it finally reaches the Pacific Ocean,
where the shallow coastal water is now unusually hot
due to the shutdown of the ocean currents.
- Whenever we have warmer water,
we tend to have stronger hurricanes or typhoons
that form there 'cause they really get their energy
from the warm surface water, and if that is warming up,
there's gonna be more energy to power those big storms.
In Puerto Vallarta, Mexico,
a group of American tourists run for their lives
as a category five hurricane slams ashore
with 60-foot waves and 165-mile-per-hour winds.
The vacationers' desperate cries for help
are barely heard over the turbulent storm water
that pulls them out to sea.
- Puerto Vallarta will be ripped apart
by a constant barrage of super cyclones.
These are massive storms
that will just walk right over the peninsula
and wipe out cities.
They will be gone.
It's not just, "A cyclone hit. We can rebuild."
It's, "Oh, a cyclone hit, and here comes another one",
and there's one after that."
Puerto Vallarta is merely the latest victim
as towns, villages, and cities
from Central to South America
get buried under water.
As the effects of the ocean current shutdown
spread around the world,
no place is immune from this disaster
which has already killed over tens of thousands of people.
But these catastrophes are just the beginning.
There's a new threat to our survival
emerging at the bottom of the world.
The ocean conveyor belt of currents
that help regulate temperatures around the globe
has come to a grinding halt
with consequences that are threatening our very existence.
A decade into the disaster,
the shutdown of the ocean currents
has set off a series of extreme weather disasters
across the world
from super storms and severe drought
to massive hurricanes
and blizzards.
Nearly a half-billion people have already died.
As the death toll climbs,
temperatures continue to plunge
in the cold regions of North American
and northern Europe.
With warm ocean currents no longer
flowing up to the north Atlantic,
the surface water remains cold,
creating frigid temperatures across northern Europe
with winters that last for ten months.
Snow falls relentlessly in Germany.
The head of the country's busiest seaport
once used giant icebreakers to get ships into port,
but it's no longer possible
to keep up with the deep freeze,
and the vital transportation hub shuts down.
Delivery of food and other resources
grinds to a halt.
People suffering from cold weather afflictions
like pneumonia and frostbite
begin to overrun hospitals.
- Frostbite is the physical freezing of your tissue
to the point where it can no longer sustain itself,
and then it rots.
And then it gets to a point
where the skin begins to turn black,
and the only thing you can do to save it from spreading
is to cut your fingers off,
or you can wait,
and they'll fall off themselves.
While Hamburg and other cities
in northern Europe freeze...
in the southern United States
it's a completely different scene,
a deadly heat wave.
Over time the stalled ocean currents
have warmed the atmosphere
and driven away the rain belt,
creating a severe drought.
Smoke now fills the skies above the Texas panhandle
as the surrounding dried-up corn fields
become a vast tinderbox for wildfires.
- The decrease in atmospheric moisture
creates much drier conditions at the surface,
and you could have large-scale fires,
and that introduces a lot of soot
and a lot of material into the atmosphere,
and it can be hazardous to human health.
People try to evacuate to safer areas,
but thousands become trapped as flames and smoke engulf homes.
- This isn't something a large military-grade
fire department would be able to handle.
Communities will be cut off and surrounded by flame.
This isn't easily escapable.
You've got fire raging across states,
across state borders.
You have tornadoes of fire forming.
This is bad.
In ten years nearly 1/10
of the world's population has perished,
and the survivors cling to life
as the planet continues to be rocked
by widespread catastrophes.
And now the research scientists who first confirmed
the shutdown of the ocean currents in the north Atlantic
have a new cause for alarm.
They take their research vessel to the South Pole.
The bottom of the planet is heating up.
- When the conveyor belt shuts down,
the heat has to go somewhere
that was going to the north Atlantic.
It's going to the south.
An enormous set of glaciers
is rapidly melting.
They're part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet,
a mass of ice 2 miles thick
and as big as the entire state of Texas.
- When the warm water comes underneath these glaciers
and starts to melt away at these pinning points,
it's gonna raise global oceans.
Despite being nearly 8,000 miles away,
Miami is among the first cities
to feel the impact of the rising seas.
Most of the metropolitan area
is only 6 feet above sea level.
On the streets people are forced to walk knee-deep
in polluted salt water
and then return to their homes that have been flooded.
New Orleans, New York,
and Boston are in equally dire straits.
With so many places becoming uninhabitable,
is there anywhere left on Earth
to escape this disaster?
Ocean currents control the climate
around the world
by regulating heat and rainfall.
If they ever stop moving,
scientists predict decades of cataclysmic weather events
that will threaten our very existence.
Could you survive?
15 years after the shutdown of the global ocean currents,
nearly half a billion people are dead.
For survivors everywhere, it's a constant battle
against storms, starvation, and disease.
And there's no end in sight.
- This is a change that is not gonna stop
after weeks or months or years.
This is something that is decades
to centuries worth of changes.
- This is a global climactic shift
that is almost too much to survive.
In The American Southwest
a severe drought has ravaged the area.
Fire departments can no longer contain the wildfires
that continue to burn through cities...
and states.
Another victim is the Colorado River.
It once was the lifeblood of the region,
supplying hydroelectric power
and providing water for millions of people.
Now it's running dry.
- If there's no snow pack and no rainfall,
the Colorado River starts to dry up.
The Colorado River also has a hydroelectric dam.
The human condition is dependent on things
like electricity and water.
You take one of those away and things fall apart.
Without water, crops and cattle
have long since died off,
and people are struggling to hang on.
- With a lower percentage of the Earth's land area
receiving ample amounts of rain,
you have starvation on the very short horizon.
The United States isn't the only country
reeling from the effects of the endless drought.
On the other side of the world,
without the annual monsoon rains,
India's ground water reserves drain down to zero.
A human will die after three days without water,
so it's a resource worth fighting for.
- The significant changes in climate
are going to inevitably lead to wars
and battles as people are struggling to possess
more precious resources...
- Or expand their territory
in order to feed their populations.
- When food is scarce, societies tend to come apart.
People can't get food.
They rebel quite often.
While an endless drought is driving
the population of India to the brink of starvation...
3,500 miles away the people of northern Europe
are losing their battle with the endless cold.
- You have concrete. You have roads.
You have buildings, pipes,
all of these things that will just slowly corrode.
The weight of the snow over so long
can destroy even the most robust building.
The former head of Hamburg's Port Authority
and his family
are just a few of the millions
migrating to southern Spain and Greece
in search of warmer temperatures.
As people seek refuge,
there's also a mass exodus in Brazil, India,
and the northeastern United States.
- Once we start to have mass migrations,
this means that governments will begin to collapse.
We could have total chaos like we already see
in certain parts of the world.
- You can't just take an entire population of a country
and drop them somewhere and go,
"Nope, we're going to be fine."
The planet will slowly squeeze us
into pockets of instability
and then kill us.
Will the climate refugees survive,
or are they leaving behind one disaster
only to face another?
The shutdown of the global ocean conveyor belt
has stopped the ocean currents from flowing,
causing an extreme cooling of the north Atlantic
and a warming effect in the world's southern oceans,
setting in motion a cascade of disasters across the world.
Is there any safe place left on Earth?
Across the globe, hundreds of millions
of people flee their homes in search of food,
water, and a livable climate.
It's a mass migration of climate refugees
that's unparalleled in history.
- We're talking entire nations or entire continents
that might be forced to migrate from one location to another.
How do we handle such a significant change
in where people live?
How do we feed them? How do we shelter them?
The crisis cuts across boundaries
of class and wealth.
A man who once ran one of the largest ports in Europe...
dies as a ragged refugee thousands of miles
from his home.
As the death toll mounts worldwide,
another disaster is brewing in the South Pole.
A buildup of heat in the southern ocean
has been eating away at the glaciers
that are part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
As they rapidly melt, sea levels rise,
and now every coastal city in the world is under threat.
- Year after year after year the water
is getting closer to my front door,
until finally the water is inside your home.
In the U.S. a storm surge
is approaching Miami.
It's high tide and a full moon,
exactly the same conditions as when super storm Sandy
struck the eastern seaboard in 2012.
But now even regular tides are over 4 feet higher
because of the rise in sea levels.
It's the worst night in Miami's history.
On the streets
people are overtaken by the churning seawater.
Some find temporary refuge...
but with the entire city in crisis,
emergency crews can't reach them all.
Many who escape drowning
will die of hunger and lack of drinking water.
Others will never be found.
- Any kind of coastal city will have a massive problem
if there's sea level rise.
If you don't have the infrastructure
in place to begin combating that,
it will just keep coming.
Smart people would move out of those cities.
You have to adapt or die.
From Miami to Rio and London,
as sea levels continue to rise across the world,
humanity will be put to the ultimate test.
The next wave of destruction
could mark the end of modern civilization.
It's the year 2101.
Global ocean currents,
which help regulate temperatures around the world,
have long since shut down,
unleashing over eight decades of violent
and cataclysmic weather events
that have changed the course of history.
Is there any chance of survival for the future generations?
Can we adapt, or is mankind's fate sealed?
In almost every corner of the world,
humanity is barely hanging on
through the worst climate crisis
since the dawn of civilization.
Famine and natural disasters
have killed nearly 2 billion people.
Mass migrations are igniting civil wars.
- It is the end of the world as we know it.
And the global catastrophe
continues to unfold in west Antarctica,
where massive glaciers
are rapidly melting into the ocean.
Sea levels are now over 7 feet higher than normal,
and they continue to rise.
- Every coastal city on the planet
will be experiencing sea level rises of this magnitude.
- The coastlines of the world
have to be rewritten and redrawn.
- Amsterdam would be gone.
Venice would be gone.
These cities would not exist anymore
other than in postcards
and if you liked scuba diving.
Miami, Florida,
which has already been beaten and battered
by titanic super storms,
now vanishes into the Atlantic Ocean,
along with most of the southeastern part of the state.
The entire northeastern seaboard of the U.S.
is forever changed.
New York is now the Venice of the 22nd century.
Lower Manhattan has been transformed into canals
where water taxis transport the rich
to walled-off buildings with entrances
safely above the rising tides.
Over 200 miles to the north in Boston...
baseball games become a symbol of defiance,
proof that life goes on in spite of climate change,
so the bleachers at Fenway Park are still packed,
but the famous ballpark,
once over 1/2 mile from the water's edge,
is now a riverfront stadium due to sea level rise.
In the harbor, Boston tries to defend itself
against the swelling waters of the Atlantic
with levees and sea walls,
but the city engineers have underestimated
just how high sea levels will continue to rise.
- The ocean is not going to put up with a sea wall.
And so when the most powerful Nor'easter
in decades strikes Boston,
the waves breach the city's barriers.
Millions of gallons of water
rush through Boston's shoreline
of bays, inlets, and rivers.
- A big storm comes along, breaches the sea wall.
You've now turned a city into, effectively, a big bowl.
The same wall that was there to protect
is now gonna keep the water inside.
Fenway Park cannot hold back
the surging sea water
as the never-ending cycle of apocalyptic weather
strikes again.
This frightening view of the future,
with our ocean currents coming to a complete standstill,
is based on science from the present.
Scientists have been warning
that the global ocean conveyor belt
may be slowing down.
For well over a century,
the Earth has been steadily warming.
Experts claim 2016 was the hottest year on record
for the entire planet,
but at the same time,
there were also record cold temperatures
in the north Atlantic.
This suggests that as global warming continues
to melt Arctic ice into the sea,
this fresh water is making the cold surface currents
less salty and dense so that they can't sink.
Without this natural process,
the world's ocean currents could eventually shut down.
- We're seeing that right now. That is ongoing.
Look at the Greenland ice sheet.
It's not only melting more, but it's melting faster,
so this is a concern because that then would provide
the large amounts of fresh water
to the north Atlantic Ocean to cause a shutdown.
- To halt or slow down the global ocean conveyor belt,
the magnitude of something like this occurring
is a game-changer for the entire planet.
It's so much energy,
so massive of a change,
humans will have to adapt to survive.
They will not be able to change
to make things back to where they were.
- This isn't some far-flung fictional thing.
A climate catastrophe is what we are facing right now.
And unless we do something soon
to prolong our way of life,
we have to begin to evolve or die.
- With sea level rise it's not a question of if it will happen.
It's almost certainly a question of when.