Officials across the Icelandic government convened in mid-October to conduct a scenario exercise of paramount importance to the Nordic country’s national security. But their goal wasn’t to game out a response to, say, a hypothetical cyberattack against Iceland’s core infrastructure or the possible penetration of its territorial waters by a Russian sub.

Iceland’s policymakers met on October 15th, at an event hosted by the nation’s Ministry of the Environment, Energy, and Climate, to prepare for the increasingly likely collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) due to rising global temperatures. This circulation dredges up cold, salty, nutrient-rich seawater from the deep Atlantic near the tropics as its warmer surface water churns northward, where this cycle pivots—pushing colder, saltier water down and southward guided by thermal convection and differences in ocean salinity.

To provide some context on what a serious reduction in AMOC might do, some climate modelers predict that the loss of heat it carries north could plunge Scandinavia into routine winter extremes of -58 degrees Fahrenheit (-50 degrees Celsius). But even as its disruption leads to drops in average monthly winter temperatures across northern Europe, an end to AMOC would also bake regions closer to the equator, weakening monsoon seasons in West Africa and India and raising the specter of drought across lower latitudes.

“One of the key roles of government is to identify threats and prepare society for them. This is how we approach volcanic eruptions and epidemics, and the same should apply to climate risks,” Iceland’s Minister of the Environment, Energy, and Climate Jóhann Páll Jóhannsson explained in a statement, translated via Google.

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