WASHINGTON — The amount of human-made heat energy absorbed by the seas has doubled since 1997, a study released Monday showed.
The study, using ocean-observing data that goes back to the British research ship Challenger in the 1870s and including high-tech modern underwater monitors and computer models, tracked how much heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.
The world’s oceans absorbed about 150 zettajoules of energy from 1865 to 1997 then absorbed about another 150 in the next 18 years, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
To put that in perspective, if you exploded one atomic bomb the size of the one that dropped on Hiroshima every second for a year, the total energy released would be 2 zettajoules. So since 1997, Earth’s oceans have absorbed heat energy equivalent to a Hiroshima-style bomb being exploded every second for 75 straight years.
