A new study says that 2017 was the warmest year on record for the world’s oceans.
2017 was the warmest year on record for the global ocean according to an updated Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAP, CAS; http://english. iap.cas.cn/) ocean analysis. The oceans in the upper 2000 m were 1.51 × 1022 J warmer than the second warmest year of 2015 and 19.19×1022 J above the 1981–2010 climatological reference period (Fig. 1). For comparison, total electricity generation in China in 2016 was 0.00216 × 1022 J, which is 699 times smaller than the increase in ocean heat in 2017.
The long-term warming trend driven by human activities continued unabated. The high ocean temperatures in recent years have occurred as greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere have also risen, reaching record highs in 2017. The results support the provisional announcement by the World Meteorological Organization in November 2017 that “Global ocean heat content in 2017 to date has been at or near record high levels”.
National Geographic says that the findings show a “long-term warming trend driven by human activities.”
The study measured the rising temperature of the ocean as a whole, but the Atlantic and Antarctic Oceans, they found, experienced the most warming.
The scientists looked at ocean temperature data that researchers from various institutions, including NOAA in the U.S., began collecting in the 1950s. Starting in the late 1990s, ocean temperatures began to take off.
Warmer oceans have been suspected to have links to a variety of bad ecosystem phenomena amongst marine life, like right whales diminishing numbers and the collapse of coral reefs.