After analyzing data from the 1950s through 2019, an international team of scientists determined that the average temperature of the world’s oceans in 2019 was 0.075 degrees Celsius (0.135 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the 1981–2010 average.
That might not seem like a significant amount of warming, but given the massive volume of the oceans, an increase even that small would require a staggering influx of heat – 228 sextillion Joules’ worth, according to the scientists’ study, which was published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on Monday.
That’s a hard number to contextualize, so one of the scientists behind the study did the math to put it into an explosive frame of reference – by comparing it to the amount of energy released by the atomic bomb the United States military dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
“The Hiroshima atom-bomb exploded with an energy of about 63,000,000,000,000 Joules,” author Lijing Cheng from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a press release.
“The amount of heat we have put in the world’s oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions.”
That averages out to four Hiroshima bombs’ worth of energy entering the oceans every second for the past 25 years. But even more troubling, the rate isn’t holding steady at that alarming figure – it’s increasing.
In 2019, ocean warming was equivalent to “about five Hiroshima bombs of heat, every second, day and night, 365 days a year,” study author John Abraham, from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, told Vice.
And in case atomic bombs are still too abstract of a comparative unit, the 2019 rate is equivalent to every person on Earth constantly…