Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: The world continued to witness ocean heat reaching record highs, as the previous year was the warmest in human history that has been recorded, according to a recent study.
Conducted by a team of two dozen scientists from sixteen institutes mainly in the United States, China, and Italy, the research was published in the international journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
In comparison with 2021, which was the previous hottest year ever recorded, the top 2,000 meters of the planet’s oceans have absorbed an amount of heat that is enough to “boil 700 million kettles”, with a single kettle containing “1.5 liters of water”, stated Cheng Lijing, one of the authors of the study and researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics which affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Ocean warming is a significant indicator for the purpose of quantifying climate change as over 90 percent of worldwide heat ends up in the oceans. Lijing believes that the rise in heat within the world’s oceans is another proof of global warming, according to a China news service report.
Trend of increasing heat in oceans to continue
Since 2017, almost every year, ocean warming records have been broken. Lijing elaborated that as a result of late response to global warming, this trend for temperatures for oceans will continue for decades.
Apart from temperatures, the study also quantified the ocean water’s salinity, regarding which, it found that areas of high salinity had a rise in salinity, whereas the opposite was true for lower salinity areas.
The warmer the oceans becomes, the more the sea level increases leading to more instance as of extreme weather, in the form of hurricanes and strong storms. This leads to oceans becoming less efficient at absorbing carbon, as a result more carbon dioxide, that has been emitted by humans, to remain in the atmosphere because of global warming exacerbates.
