Scientists think it is clear that the warming of sea waters will change the Earth’s climate strongly in the near future.
The average temperature of the Earth’s oceans has risen since the beginning of March in a way that amazes scientists.
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This doesn’t sound like much, but on the scale of the oceans, the change is extraordinary.
– It’s huge. The change is drastic when you take into account that the waters were already warm at the start, says a climate researcher from the University of Colorado in an interview with the news agency AP Kris Karnauskas.
The warming is clearly related to the natural El Niño and La Niña phenomena felt especially in the Pacific Ocean. During the last three years, La Niña has prevailed, which cools the surface waters of the oceans. La Niña has been unusually strong and long-lasting. Now El Niño is taking over, which has a warming effect.
Some scientists think that it is simply the effect of El Niño combined with human-caused global warming.
El Niño, but what else?
However, many researchers believe that a more complex change is underway.
Karnauskas investigated where the change has been strongest. He found a strip of sea along the equator in the Pacific and Indian oceans, whose temperature had risen by a whopping 0.4 degrees over a period of 10 to 14 days.
Scientists are now coming to the conclusion that the heat stored in the deep parts of the oceans is now being released.
Human-caused global warming has warmed the seas, and the heat has spread to ever deeper layers of water. of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Sarah Purkey says that deep waters have been warming for seven years, since the last El Niño ended. This has not been easy to notice, as La Niña has cooled the surface waters.
The heat storage of the oceans is huge, it is equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshima atomic bombs.
La Niña has acted as a cover that has prevented the release of heat. Now the cover is gone, estimates a marine scientist from the US Ocean and Climate Research Institute NOAA Mike McPhaden.
This year’s March was the second warmest in the world’s recorded weather history. Scientists believe that it was a foretaste of the warming that will happen in the coming months.
When the heat stored in the depths of the oceans is released, global warming will accelerate, scientists believe.
Source: AP