The North Atlantic Ocean is home to a "warming hole" that has enthralled scientists, but a new study said this mysterious zone may be evidence of something moretroubling.

, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, is part of a growing chorus of research that suggests the cold patch showsa major ocean current system may be slowing down— and melting Arctic sea ice could be the culprit.

“Ithink the main thing about our paper that we show is that the Arctic sea ice loss can play an active role in climate change and ocean change as well,” said Alexey Fedorov of Yale University, one of the study’s authors.

There's been in the last few years about the causes of both the "warming hole"south of Greenlandand a cold "blob" located in the same part of the North Atlantic, where an area of water that's consistently cooler compared to the surrounding area was discovered several years ago. Scientists who believe they are related saynot as muchheat is getting transported to that region of the North Atlantic anymore, indicating problems with one of the ocean’s most important currents.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is critical to the Earth's climate. It acts as a conveyor belt of sorts for the ocean, carrying warm water north from the equatorand sending cool water back down from the Arctic. But some recent studies have led many scientists to worry that global warming could slow the AMOC’s flow even more.

Backingthat theory, the new study sees melting sea ice as a potentially major cause of both a weakening AMOC and the North Atlantic warming hole. Researchers further reinforced their findings bysimulating the melting of Arctic sea ice, which had the same effect.

Based on these findings, the study concluded melting Arctic sea ice has probably already played a significant role in weakening the AMOC, and may continue to do so in the coming years.

Whether the AMOC has actually been weakening is still a subject of contention among oceanographers.

“We only have direct observations for the last decade and, although these have shown a weakening over that time, other evidence has pointed to this being variability ,” Laura Jackson, an ocean circulation expert at the British Met Office, told the Washington Post. “We know that in different models the AMOC has different sensitivities, so these results may be model dependent. Nevertheless, this role of the sea ice is an interesting possibility.”