Climate change is at work here;

It gave us the hottest year in the world to date, 2023.

My colleague Johann Grolle spoke to researchers about a phenomenon that is currently worrying many of them: It's not just the air that is currently far too warm.

So are the world's oceans.

For months, temperature records have been broken in the oceans that seemed completely unthinkable just a short time ago.

What is going on, what does it mean for life in the oceans and what for the people on the coasts?

Johann's interview partners try to piece together the anomalies in the world's oceans into an overall picture.

His report is both fascinating and alarming.

Over warm seas, more water evaporates and then rains down again.

From now on there is a threat of “medicines” in the Mediterranean that are similar to hurricanes in the Atlantic.

We are experiencing more and more directly how much man-made climate change is changing our future.

International researchers have distributed around 4,000 drifting buoys across the world's oceans.

Thanks to them, they can track global temperature developments down to a depth of 2,000 meters - and calculate how much additional energy the water will have absorbed in 2023.

Hold on tight, dear readers.

It's 15 zettajoules.

This increase alone, Johann writes, "equivalent to about 25 times the world's energy consumption or the amount of energy that would have been produced if eight Hiroshima bombs had been detonated every second for the entire year."

No, I don't understand that either.

But I understand one thing: the oceans do a tremendous amount for us.

So far they have absorbed around 90 percent of the additional heat caused by the greenhouse effect.

Without them we would be in heat hell long ago.

We have to hope that we can still count on them in the future.

Heartfelt

Your Marco Evers

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