Can you imagine the explosion of 3 atomic bombs per second on Earth, with nearly 100 million atomic bombs exploding every year?
In fact, you don't need to imagine that we are actually experiencing such a disaster.
It is an indisputable reality that the planet is warming, and the oceans absorb 90% of the world's climate change energy. According to a 2019 study, for nearly 150 years since 1871, global warming has been equivalent to an average of 1.5 atomic bombs exploding on Earth every second, while in recent decades it has accelerated to 3 to 6 atomic bombs per second.
According to the study, 90 percent of the heat deposited by greenhouse gases emitted by humans has been absorbed by the oceans, while the rest remains in the atmosphere, on land, and in heating the polar ice sheets.
Much of the heat absorbed by the oceans is stored in the depths of the ocean, but measurements of these places began only a few decades ago, with previous studies dating back only around 1950.
The team led by Professor Raul Zanner of the University of Oxford conducted a more in-depth study. Using Argo pontoon data and computer models, the researchers combined ocean surface temperatures since 1871 with computer models of ocean circulation and monitored how they spread inward over time, reconstructing models of changes in ocean heat content covering the full depth of the global ocean over the past 150 years.
The results show that human activities are injecting a lot of energy into the climate system, the vast majority of which is absorbed by the oceans, and the total heat absorbed by the oceans in the past 150 years has reached 436 (±91) X10^21 joules, which is about 1000 times the annual energy use of the global population!
That's the equivalent of 1.5 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding on Earth every second over 150 years, and more recently, it's getting faster and faster.
The researchers estimate that from 1990 to 2015, the oceans absorbed an average of as much heat per second as the energy contained in the three Hiroshima atomic bombs, that is, nearly 100 million atomic bombs explode on Earth each year, and this is only the minimum of the estimate.
Therefore, the rise of the Earth's sea level is not only contributed by the melting of global glaciers and polar ice sheets, but also by the physical expansion of warming water bodies in the oceans.
The increased heat in the oceans is driving sea levels up, making typhoons and hurricanes more common and powerful, threatening billions of people on the world's coasts.
The earth's warm and comfortable livable environment has been shaped by billions of years of life, and is it only a hundred or two hundred years before it will be ruthlessly destroyed by a certain kind of life?
It's a miracle that the energy of nearly 50 million atomic bombs is constantly injected into the ocean every year, and that the industrial revolution has lasted for 150 years, and we are still alive!
Stay tuned: