Global Ocean Temperatures Reached Record High in 2024 [Video]

Global sea temperatures reached an all-time high in 2024, according to a new study published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. 

The 54 researchers from seven countries deployed thousands of instruments to collect ocean data both at the surface and up to 2,000 meters below the surface — the latter called ocean heat content — covering all the world’s oceans. 

“The broken records in the ocean have become a broken record,” professor Lijing Cheng with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a press release.

The researchers found that all three major metrics they analyzed broke records this year: global sea surface temperature, average global sea surface temperature and the temperature of water up to 2,000 meters below the surface. 

From 2023 to 2024, the researchers recorded an enormous increase of the upper 2,000 meters of ocean heat content of 16 zettajoules. That increase represents about …