Currents transport heat from one place to another, so "all of the above".

It was huge. It also contained lots of methane, they sprayed chemicals all over the Mexican gulf to contain the spill, an explosion, a sunken oil rig, etc. As mentioned, I remember it from the news back then and don't really have a clue about the details. :D

Regardless, the point was that currents can change without Jake Gyllenhall having to chase antibiotics on a derelict frozen tanker in NYC.

The changes will mostly destabilize the weather, and prevent heat from being transferred from A to B. And long those long-term weather effects are scarier than Hollywood blockbusters.

I won't claim I understand the details, but there were quite a few reports of disruptions of the Gulf Stream during the months after the incident. Mind you, temporary disruptions happen everey now and then -- the main issues if they were permanent would be the effects of the weather and the underwater ecosystem in the North Atlantic.

Wrong ocean current and a somewhat unrealistic scenario, but yes, it has.

In the real world, the North-Atlantic current has been struggling for almost a decade now. The adjoining Gulf stream almost stopped completely for a while during that BP oil spill, and the system has been wonky since.

Luckily, there's no current risk of people being deep frozen within minutes. Lots of snow and warm winters are coming though.

Once the problems were fixed, there we started getting some details of things we've previously only seen as dots. It provided a lot of data, but it wasn't as visually impressive right away like with the Webb telescope.

The visual wow moments in the 90's came from probes like Gallileo. Not that Hubble hasn't provided amazing images, but mostly it provided actual images of many distant objects. And pixels where we previously didn't see anything.