Every calendar year since 2019, ocean temperatures have reached new record highs. 2025 was no exception, according to a new study. The study, published Jan. 9 in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, found that the ocean heat content (OHC) in the upper 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) of the water column had increased by a […]

Every calendar year since 2019, ocean temperatures have reached new record highs. 2025 was no exception, according to a new study. The study, published Jan. 9 in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, found that the ocean heat content (OHC) in the upper 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) of the water column had increased by a larger amount than in any year since 2017. “Holy shit, the oceans are hot,” John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in the U.S. and a coauthor of the study, told Mongabay. “I would say it’s an exceptionally large [heat] increase, and it’s surprisingly large and it’s alarmingly large,” he added. Global ocean heat content (OHC) changes for the upper 2,000 m (6,562 ft) of ocean waters since 1958, according to the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). A 1981-2010 average is set as the reference level. The black curves represent monthly changes while the columns show yearly changes. The green bars represent uncertainty estimates. Image by Pan et al., 2025 (CC BY 4.0). Lijing Cheng, a professor at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, seated in the green chair, led the multi-team study on ocean temperatures for calendar year 2025. Image courtesy of Chenhao Guo. The study was undertaken by 55 scientists in 10 research teams located all over the world and led by Lijing Cheng of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) at the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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