The extreme heat in the oceans exceeded the “point of no return” in 2014, and has become a new normal, study finds.
The investigation was published in the Plos Climate Journal.
Scientists have analysed ocean surface temperatures over the past 150 years that have risen due to overall warming.
The scientists then looked at how many times the ocean has been above this point.
By 2014, scientists discovered that over 50 percent of monthly records covering the entire sea had exceeded the extreme heat threshold, once in a 50-year period.
The trend continued in the years that followed, with 57 per cent of the world’s oceans in 2019, the final year measured by the study.
By this benchmark, only two% of the sea surface at the end of the nineteenth century experienced extremely warm temperatures.
Professor John Abraham, from the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, is one of the teams behind the evaluation, and said temperature in the ocean was most relevant to global climate while surface temperatures were most relevant for weather patterns and many ecosystems.
