At great depths..
The world's oceans are burning like the fires of Mordor... or in other words... "heating at a rate of two trillion 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously" says The Sydney Morning Herald. This is global warming's full impact in play.
A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change, in a paper entitled "Unabated planetary warming and its ocean structure since 2006", assessed data from about 3500 Argo buoys from 2006-13 to exhibit the warming temperatures at about 0.0005 degrees a year, down to a depth of 500 metres and 0.002 degrees between 500-2000 metres.
Oceans south of the 20-degree latitude accounted for two-thirds to 98 per cent of the heat gain. Three giant gyres in the Southern Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans are largely responsible for drawing down the extra warmth, states The Sydney Morning Herald.
This proves that the oceans are warming, however this is not the most unusual thing... this we knew. The interesting aspect of this study is the rate and pattern of heat gain. Until the fleet of argo buoys were launched, coverage of ocean temperatures was linked to records provided by ships, which were strongly bias tot he northern hemisphere, near continental coasts and during summer.
However, these Argo floats have enhanced our ability to track what is happening to our Earth's oceans. Because of the inconsistent trend in mean sea-surface temperatures since 1998, climate change deniers point to this when claiming that global warming isn't happening.
"The ocean is just vertically transferring the heat away from the surface to the depth," Dr Wijffels, an oceans expert at the CSIRO and one of the report's authors said.
If oceans absorbed less of the heat, temperatures in the atmosphere would rise, and this would be dramatic. However, the heat absorbed by the oceans forces them to swell in volume, lifting sea levels and affecting ecosystems.
Such as our Great Barrier Reef, which is already faltering due to climate change and receiving hard blows from humans trying to poison it with only money on their mind. This means mitigation is key to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
More of these studies will be conducted in the future, however Dr Wijffels states that Australia's contribution is uncertain due to half of its Argo budget tied up with the Abbott government's interference with higher education reform bills. Maybe not for long? We hope.
To act on mitigating these dramatic temperature rises, check out what you can do through our Six Ways To Live Simply.
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