Antarctic Ocean absorbs highest amount of human activity caused heat

NEW DELHI: The southern waters surrounding Antarctica, or the Southern Ocean, absorbed the highest amount of human activity-caused heat over the past two decades, almost equal to that taken up by the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean combined, researchers have found in a new study.

Ocean warming has accelerated dramatically since the 1990s, nearly doubling during 2010-2020 relative to 1990-2000, the researchers led by the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, said.

However, the region-wise distribution of ocean warming was far from uniform and thus, the newfound knowledge had implications for our understanding of sea-level rise and climate impacts, they said in their study published in the journal Nature Communications.

Increase in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, caused by human activity, traps heat within the Earth’s climate system, warming air, land and oceans, and melting polar ice.

The oceans take up most of this heat, absorbing more than 90 per cent of the excess human-generated heat, thereby moderating atmospheric temperature rises.

While ocean warming helps slow the pace of climate change, it is not without cost, said Matthew England, co-author of the study from the UNSW Centre for Marine Science and Innovation.

For the study, the researchers compared all available observations of ocean warming activity spanning modern Argo float data - an international ocean research program collecting information using robotic instruments - to those taken in the 1950s when only sparse measurements were made from ship-borne devices.

They then analysed the heat uptake across water masses and quantified each water

mass’s role in ocean heat

content change.