A recent study has revealed that the rate of ocean warming has more than doubled in the last forty years.
In the late 1980s, ocean temperatures were rising at a rate of roughly 0.06 degrees Celsius per ten years; today, they are rising at a rate of 0.27 degrees Celsius every 10 years.
The study, which was published in Environmental Research Letters, contributes to the explanation of the record-breaking ocean temperatures of 2023 and early 2024.
“Warming Has Picked up Speed”
Professor Chris Merchant, lead author at the University of Reading and National Centre for Earth Observation, said, “If the oceans were a bathtub of water, then in the 1980s, the hot tap was running slowly, warming up the water by just a fraction of a degree each decade.”
“But now the hot tap is running much faster, and the warming has picked up speed. The way to slow down that warming is to start closing off the hot tap, by cutting global carbon emissions and moving towards net-zero,” he added.
The Earth’s increasing energy imbalance, in which more energy from the Sun is being absorbed in the Earth system than is escaping back to space, is the cause of this accelerated ocean warming.
Due in part to rising greenhouse gas concentrations and the Earth’s decreased ability to reflect sunlight into space, this imbalance has nearly doubled since 2010.
Entire Climate Changing
In 2023 and early 2024, the world’s ocean temperatures reached record highs for 450 days in a row. El Niño, a natural warming occurrence in the Pacific, contributed to some of this warmth.
When scientists compared it to a similar El Niño in 2015–16, they discovered that the sea surface warming more quickly in the last decade than in previous decades accounts for the remaining record warmth. The oceans’ accelerated rate of heat absorption was responsible for 44% of the record warmth.
The results demonstrate that the general pace of ocean warming that has been witnessed globally in recent decades is not a reliable indicator of future events. It is possible that the increase in ocean temperature that has been observed over the last 40 years will be surpassed in the next 20 years alone.
This affects the entire climate since the surface waters are the primary source of global warming.
This increasing warming emphasizes how urgent it is to cut back on the use of fossil fuels in order to start stabilizing the climate and avert future temperature increases that are considerably faster.
