Evidence Shows Global Heat May Be Hiding in Oceans

Far below the surface, the waters of south-east Asia are heating up.  A region of the Pacific is now warming at least 15 times faster than at any time in the last 10,000 years.  If this finding – so far limited to the depths where the Pacific and Indian Oceans wash into each other – is true for the blue planet as a whole, then the questions of climate change take on a new urgency.

Yair Rosenthal of Rutgers University in New Brunswick and colleagues from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, report in the journal Science that deep ocean warming could right now be taking much of the heat that meteorologists had expected to find in the atmosphere.

In the last few years, even though greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere have gone up, the rate of increase in global average temperatures has slowed, and there is evidence that much of the expected heat is being absorbed by the oceans and carried beneath the surface.

Evidence Shows Global Heat May Be Hiding in Oceans