Published originally on Substack.
Last year, the world's oceans absorbed a record amount of heat, equivalent to twelve Hiroshima-scale explosions every second.
Not metaphorically.
Thermodynamically.
Over the course of a single year, that adds up to roughly 378 million Hiroshima bombs' worth of energy quietly absorbed by seawater. No flash. No sound. No ruins photographed from above. Just heat, banked in the largest thermal reservoir on Earth.
Spread across the planet's surface, about 510 million square kilometers, that is roughly 1.35 Hiroshima bombs per square kilometer, added in just one year.
The Hiroshima bomb's immediate lethal zone covered roughly 13 square kilometers. In energy terms, global warming added the equivalent of more than ten planet-wide kill zones to the ocean in a single year.
And then we did it again.
A Century of Accumulation, Not a Single Event
This was not an anomaly.
It was part of a century-long trend.
For more than 100 years, the oceans have been absorbing the vast majority of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases-- over 90 percent. The atmosphere gets the headlines, but the ocean keeps the books.
Every year, we add to the balance.
None of it is erased.
Unlike air temperatures, which fluctuate seasonally, ocean heat is durable. Once driven below the surface, it remains locked within the system, slowly migrating through layers of water that circulate on timescales far longer than those of politics, markets, or human lifespans.
Through the thermohaline circulation-- the great global conveyor belt that moves heat and salt through the deep ocean-- this energy will be recirculated back to the surface over roughly 1,000 to 1,500 years.
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