An international team of 14 researchers, from 11 different institutes, analyzed data from the 1950s through 2019 and found evidence that the Earth is heating up at an extremely fast rate. Over the last 30 years, from 1987-2019, the surface of the world’s oceans has warmed by about 1-degree Fahrenheit. This means the oceans’ heat rate for this period has been 4 ½ times faster than between 1955-1986.
The study, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, shows 2019 average ocean temperatures were 0.135 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1981-2010 average. This figure may sound insignificant, but the ocean is estimated to be 321,003,271 cubic miles, the smallest increase in temperatures would require a staggering influx of heat. The ocean would have absorbed 228 sextillion Joules of heat to reach this slight temperature increase.
These enormous numbers may be hard to visualize, which is why a scientist of the study expressed the math in an explosive point of view. Lijing Cheng, from the CAS, compared the number of joules to the amount of energy released by the Hiroshima, Japan 1945 atomic bomb dropped by the U.S military.
Cheng said:
The Hiroshima atom-bomb exploded with an energy of about 63,000,000,000,000 Joules. The amount of heat we have put in the world’s oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions.
Cheng’s math shows that for every second four Hiroshima bombs’ worth of energy entered the oceans, for the past 25 years. Unfortunately, the alarmingly high rate of four atomic bombs isn’t holding steady, it’s increasing.
According to co-author John Abraham, from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, ocean warming in 2019 was equal to “about five Hiroshima bombs of heat, every second, day and night, 365 days a year.” Abraham is an engineering professor who specializes in thermal sciences at the University.
For those who think the atomic bombs are too abstract of a comparative unit, another way to describe how much heat is entering the oceans is:
each human on the planet pointing 100 hairdryers at the ocean, 24 hours a day, all year long.
Abraham said:
The less technical term is: It’s a s***-ton of energy. This is really impacting us, and it’s going to be devastating.
As oceans heat up, ice melts faster, causing sea levels to rise. Some marine life even dies because it can’t adapt quickly enough. Hotter oceans cause more water to evaporate into the atmosphere, which increases humidity and rapidly develops supercharged storms.
“It makes hurricanes and typhoons more powerful, and it makes rainfall more intense. It puts our weather on steroids,” Abraham explained.
90% of global warming heat gets absorbed into the ocean, while less than 4% of the heat warms the atmosphere and land. This makes our oceans heat rate a more accurate way to measure how much the Earth is warming.
To measure how hot the oceans are getting, the scientists gathered data from a network of over 3,800 buoys, which are known as the Argo system. The floats reach to depths of 2,000 meters and regularly record salinity and temperature readings. The Argo system gives researchers a precise reading of the world’s ocean temperatures.
Abraham warned:
Global warming is real, and it’s getting worse. This is just the tip of the iceberg for what is to come. Fortunately, we can do something about it: We can use energy more wisely, and we can diversify our energy sources. We have the power to reduce this problem. It’s not too late to do something about it. The longer we delay, the harder and more expensive it will be, but we can still take action to make it less bad.
The rate is increasing, but humans can work together to reverse their effect on climate change. Oceans will take longer to respond than land and atmospheric environments. Every second that we delay taking action the situation gets worse by five atom bombs.
