2017 is the second hottest year in the history of civilization, according to NASA data. However, when talking about global ocean temperatures, 2017 is recorded as the year with the highest ocean temperatures of all time.
The latest data from the Department of Atmospheric Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences based on ocean data analysis of the past half century, show a clear trend: the world's oceans are getting hotter and last year is the Earth's oceans reaching their highest temperatures. If the condition of Earth's atmospheric temperature usually decreases with the turn of the year, the temperature of the ocean continues to rise as the planet we live in.
"Note the temperature of the Earth's oceans is remarkable because according to the trend of rising temperatures Earth," said Robert Anderson, a geochemistry expert at Columbia University when encountered VICE. "Those who believe in warming global warming stop definitely have not seen warming ocean temperatures."
The latest study published Friday last week is the result of a 2,000 meter-wide ocean temperatures analysis across the globe. In conclusion the temperature of the ocean reached its highest point last year.
Researchers around the world can measure the temperature of the ocean that continues to rise, thanks to the help of a collection of floating robots known as Argo. About 4,000 floating robots swim with the ocean currents since 2000. For ten days, these robots will dive to a depth of 2000 meters collecting ocean salinity temperature data.
The results are remarkable: the oceans on Earth have been shown to absorb the excess heat from global warming triggered by human actions over the last 50 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is not a small amount. When compared to the amount of heat absorbed by the ocean by 2017, according to one of the researchers in the study above, the equivalent of China's total power output in 2016.
"This is a huge amount of heat," said Gregory Johnson, oceanographer at Seattle Pacific Marine Environmental Institute, when contacted by VICE News. "The amount is about 350 terawatts, or the same five times the amount of energy released by atomic bombs as dropped on Hiroshima, every second continuously."
The problem is, the volume of water is also increasing. The researchers found that increasing ocean temperatures between 2016 and 2017 led to an increase in sea level of up to two millimeters-this is beyond the increase caused by glacial melt or large ice chunks, two factors that trigger global sea level rise.