Betcha' didn't know that the oceans are a massive heat buffer for the world?
Our oceans absorb and house a lot of heat.
As in, 90% of all excess human-emitted heat from greenhouse gases.
This allows us to use our oceans as a marker for the amount of heat that is increasing the world over.
Heat that would be massively devastating for Earth if it were not properly stored.
As you can probably guess, that is good for us superficially, but very bad for all aquatic life.
In 2019, the shallowest parts of the ocean - within 2km depth - experienced the hottest temperatures within recorded human history.
Our oceans temperature in 2019 received a 0.075-degree Celsius increase on its average.
Doesn't sound like much?
But think about the scale of the Earth's oceans...
Think about how big the ocean is and how much energy it would take to heat that much water.
How much energy is heating Earth's oceans?
We're going to take our time and break this down.
But in simple numbers (that aren't really simple), our oceans have been on the receiving end of 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules of heat.
To break that down into it's more digestible form, 228 Zetta Joules.
A typical atom bomb houses a potential 63,000,000,000,000 Joules, meaning the oceans have absorbed 3.6 billion atom bombs worth of heat energy...
This is not a slow increase in temperature.
Rather, the heating is accelerating at a breakneck pace.
The rate of heating has increased by 500% since the 1980s.
The mechanism of the heating is simple.
The suns rays reach Earth, part of it is reflected back into space while the rest is absorbed and re-radiated by greenhouse gases like CO2.
We have known since the 1970s that the world's southern hemisphere is most at risk of rising heat due to the axis of the Earth.
This leads to devastation in ecosystems.
In 2014 a large heatwave decimated the population of sea life including 100 million codfish and countless plankton, the main feeder of billions of sea life.
Other consequences include melting ice sheets, bleaching coral reefs, rising sea level, greater typhoons and hurricanes, less oxygen in ocean water.
The warming of our oceans is undeniable proof that our planet is experiencing a warming effect.
#Space_Aus
