Average temperatures across the world’s oceans reached an all-time high in 2024, a new multi-team study shows. The temperatures surpassed even those of 2023, which themselves represented a marked uptick over any previous years on record, according to the study published Jan.10 in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. The ocean stores about 90% of the excess heat from human-caused global warming and is therefore viewed as a measure of planetary health. The ocean data “continue to indicate unabated trends in global heating,” says the study, which had 54 authors led by Lijing Cheng of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “To know what is happening to the climate, the answer is in the ocean,” John Abraham, a thermal scientist at the University of St. Thomas in the U.S. and a co-author of the study, said in a statement. Ocean temperatures have risen steadily since the 1950s, when modern measurements were first taken. The graph shows the global ocean heat content (OHC) for the upper 2,000 meters (6,562 feet), relative to a 1981–2010 baseline. The energy unit is zetta joules (ZJ). One ZJ equals 10^21 joules. The within-year variation of OHC is shown in the inner box, with 2024 values shown in red. Image courtesy of Cheng et al. The long-term rise in ocean temperatures isn’t just an effect of climate change but also a cause. “[T]he weather is becoming more affected by warming oceans because the warmer waters add heat and moisture…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Global ocean temperatures set new record in 2024 first appeared on EnviroLink Network.