Ocean Warming Rate in 2019
The average temperature of the world’s oceans in 2019 was determined to be 0.075 degrees Celsius (0.135 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the 1981–2010 average by an international team of scientists who analyzed the data from the 1950s through 2019.
This increase might not seem like a significant amount of warming but according to the scientists’ study, with the massive volume of the oceans given, a staggering influx of heat – 228 sextillion Joules’ worth would be caused with an increase even that small.
On Monday, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences journal published this study.
As such a number is a hard number to contextualize, one of the study’s scientists did the math and put the number into an explosive frame of reference and compared it to the amount of energy released by the atomic bomb dropped in 1945 on Hiroshima, Japan by the United States military.
In a press release Lijing Cheng, an author from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said, “The atom bomb exploded in Hiroshima exploded with an energy of about 63,000,000,000,000 Joules. In the past 25 years, the amount of heat generated from around 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions equals to the amount of heat we
have put in the world’s oceans.”This means that for every second in the past 25 years, an average of four Hiroshima bombs’ worth of energy has been entering the oceans. At such an alarming figure, it is even more troubling to see the rate continuing to increase and not holding steady.
From the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, John Abraham, author of the study told Vice that, ” The ocean warming rate in 2019 was equivalent to “about five Hiroshima bombs of heat, every second, day and night, 365 days a year.”
He gave another comparable rate in case the atomic bombs are still too abstract of a comparison unit. He explained that the ocean warming rate in 2019 is equivalent to every person on Earth constantly pointing 100 hairdryers at the oceans.
He said that it is already having a massive impact on the environment and to make it simple in less technical terms, he said, “It’s a huge ton of energy.”
The sea levels rise as the melting of ice is faster. As marine life like dolphins and other organisms cannot adapt quickly enough, they are dying. There is a negative impact on our planet with an increase in the amount of water evaporating from the oceans into the atmosphere due to the heat.
Abraham told Vice that, ” This makes the rainfalls more intense and makes typhoons and hurricanes more powerful.”
“It is like our weather is put on steroids due to this.”
The important thing to remember is that every moment we delay in taking any action to reverse or slow the warming, the situation only gets worse as the rate is constantly increasing.
Futurism originally published this article.
Editor’s Note: Ocean Warming Rate in 2019
