The Earth’s oceans are warming from Climate Change. Although the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed everything down, it’s still not enough. The Earth’s Oceans are absorbing serious amounts of thermal energy. Today, we are going to talk about how this was discovered, why it is important, and how we can help. Now let’s do this.
First of all, how was this discovered? Researchers used moor sensors, Argo Floats, underwater robots, and other instruments to record and detect thermal energy in the ocean. An Argo float is a robot that floats at different sea levels, recording information and statistics about things like salinity, temperature, etc. They surface every 10 days to send the information to a satellite. They found that the upper ocean region contained 234 sextillions joules or 10 to the power of 21 more heat energy than the mean amount of energy of recordings from 1981 to 2010. This technically means that the amount of energy absorbed by the oceans in 2020 was enough to boil 1.3 billion kettles!
There is something very important to note here though, about why you have to take these statistics with a grain of salt. Mr. Kevin Trenbirth, a respected climate scientist working with the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research states that the Argo floats are overestimating the amount of energy in the ocean by a lot and that the ocean may have only absorbed 1 sextillion joules of energy in 2020. But, that’s still 65 million kettles left to boil. They figured this out using a more conservative method using simulations to find out how many joules were absorbed.
Now, you may be wondering that this isn’t important, and this doesn’t affect me, so why should I care. But, in reality, it’s a whole different situation. The reason why we need to know how much energy is in the ocean is that the more energy in the ocean, the more ice that melts, which raises sea levels, allowing for tropical storms to become much stronger. knowing how much energy there is allows meteorologists to see which places are in danger. This helps save many lives. Rising sea levels also damage big cities like New York and San Fransisco. So, if this continues, they will be completely underwater.
Ok, now that you understand the seriousness of this situation, you might want to help. There are lots of things you can do. The best solution for this is to reduce carbon emissions, and that’s where you can help. You can recycle, reduce, and reuse to reduce the need to produce goods because doing that causing greenhouse gases. If everyone helps, we can slow down climate change. And, ecosystems like marshes, mangroves, etc. can absorb over 40 times more Co2 because of their biodiversity and quantity of plants. So, if you check to see if the products that you are buying aren’t from those types of biomes and if you protest logging companies who sometimes harvest from those regions, you can help end climate change. Together, we can do it.
In the end, the increasing heat of the oceans is scary, but if we all work together, we can fix this. But, it’s you who needs to take charge end try to end climate change. Thanks for reading.
Sources:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/earth-oceans-storing-heat-record-breaking-amounts