Never before since the measurements were taken in the middle of the last century were the oceans as warm as in 2019. This is apparent from a new analysis carried out by an international team of fourteen scientists from eleven institutes worldwide.
This continues the annual trend; a new heat record has been recorded every year for the last five years. Moreover, the temperatures of the global oceans have not been so high in the last ten years. According to the researchers, the temperatures not only increased, but this process also accelerated.
The results of the research were published on Monday in the scientific journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. In it, the scientists call on people to take action for the climate.
The study shows that the average temperature of the ocean water in 2019 was approximately 0.075 degrees above the average for the period 1981-2010. This means that oceans have absorbed 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of heat.
“Those are a lot of zeros indeed and that is why I made a comparison,” says lead researcher Lijing Cheng. “The Hiroshima atomic bomb released 63,000,000,000,000 joules of energy. The amount of heat we’ve put into the oceans in the last 25 years corresponds to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atomic bombs,” he says.
According to Cheng, human emissions of greenhouse gases are the only explanation why the oceans are warming up.
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The temperatures of the oceans have been rising for years. (Photo: Getty Images)
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