A new study spearheaded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that the amount of man-made heat energy put into the Earth's oceans has doubled since the year 1997. Although scientists have long known that the majority of the man-made heat energy - over 90 percent - makes its way into the oceans as opposed to the ground, the new study used ocean data from as far back as the British Challenger research ship in the 1870s and combined it with recent methods, such as underwater monitors and computer modeling, to track the approximate amount of man-made heat absorbed by the ocean over the last 150 years.
The results showed that approximately 150 zettajoules of energy were absorbed by the ocean between the years 1865 and 1997, followed by the absorption of an additional 150 over the following 18 years. This amount of energy is equal to dropping a bomb the size of Hiroshima every second for 75 years in a row.
"The changes we're talking about, they are really, really big numbers," Paul Durack, coauthor of the study, said in a press release. "They are nonhuman numbers."
Although the data isn't exact due to the fact that computer simulations didn't allow for accurate tracking in some decades, the raw data isn't as important as the rate of change - the increase in man-made heat in oceans is cause for concern.
"After 2000 in particular the rate of change is really starting to ramp up," Durack said, meaning that the Earth is experiencing an acceleration in the amount of energy being trapped in its climate system. Even more troubling, the more that the ocean warms, the less heat it is able to absorb, meaning more heat in the air and on the surface of the Earth.
"These finding have potentially serious consequences for life in the oceans as well as for patterns of ocean circulation, storm tracks and storm intensity," said Jane Lubchenco, the former chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The findings were published in the Jan. 18 issue of Nature Climate Change.
