Global reconstruction of historical ocean heat storage and transport

L. Zanna, S. Khatiwala, J.M. Gregory, J. Ison, & P. Heimbach | January 2019, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Zanna et al. (2019): “Since the 19th century, rising greenhouse gas concentrations have caused the ocean to absorb most of the Earth’s excess heat and warm up. Before the 1990s, most ocean temperature measurements were above 700 m and therefore, insufficient for an accurate global estimate of ocean warming. We present a method to reconstruct ocean temperature changes with global, full-depth ocean coverage, revealing warming of 436 x 10²¹ Joules since 1871.

Our reconstruction, which agrees with other estimates for the well-observed period, demonstrates that the ocean absorbed as much heat during 1921–1946 as during 1990–2015. Since the 1950s, up to one-half of excess heat in the Atlantic Ocean at midlatitudes has come from other regions via circulation-related changes in heat transport.”

Damian Carrington (2019): “More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the seas, with just a few per cent heating the air, land and ice caps respectively. The vast amount of energy being added to the oceans drives sea-level rise and enables hurricanes and typhoons to become more intense. … A Guardian calculation found the average heating across that 150-year period was equivalent to about 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. But the heating has accelerated over that time as carbon emissions have risen, and was now the equivalent of between three and six atomic bombs per second.

Bibliography

Carrington, D. (2019). Global warming of oceans equivalent to an atomic bomb per second. The Guardian, Geraadpleegd op 12 juli 2025, van https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/07/global-warming-of-oceans-equivalent-to-an-atomic-bomb-per-second

L. Zanna, S. Khatiwala, J.M. Gregory, J. Ison, & P. Heimbach, Global reconstruction of historical ocean heat storage and transport, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116 (4) 1126-1131, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1808838115 (2019).