The oceans absorbed an unfathomable amount of heat this decade

Without the oceans, we'd really be screwed.

That's because the sprawling seas — some  321,003,000 cubic miles of them — soak up over 90 percent of the heat trapped on Earth by human-created carbon emissions, which are still growing. This colossal heat absorption tempers the continued atmospheric warming of the remote, pale blue dot we inhabit.

"The ocean is delaying our punishment," said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

The quantity of heat the oceans have absorbed in the last decade is difficult to describe, if not imagine. The ocean's heat content is measured in the most standard unit of energy, joules (using a 100-watt lightbulb for three hours eats up 1,080,000 joules). Between 2010 and 2019, the seas absorbed roughly 110,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy.  Read more...

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