The Southern Ocean absorbs more heat than any other ocean on Earth and the impacts will be felt for generations

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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/sep/08/the-southern-ocean-absorbs-more-heat-than-any-other-ocean-on-earth-and-the-impacts-will-be-felt-for-generations

By Maurice Huguenin, Matthew England and Ryan Holmes, The Guardian. 

Excerpt: Over the last 50 years, the oceans have been working in overdrive to slow global warming, absorbing about 40% of our carbon dioxide emissions, and more than 90% of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere. But as our research published today in Nature Communications has found, some oceans work harder than others. We used a computational global ocean circulation model to examine exactly how ocean warming has played out over the last 50 years. And we found the Southern Ocean has dominated the global absorption of heat. In fact, Southern Ocean heat uptake accounts for almost all the planet’s ocean warming, thereby controlling the rate of climate change. This Southern Ocean warming and its associated impacts are effectively irreversible on human timescales, because it takes millennia for heat trapped deep in the ocean to be released back into the atmosphere. This means changes happening now will be felt for generations to come – and those changes are only set to get worse, unless we can stop carbon dioxide emissions and achieve net zero. ...Ocean warming buffers the worst impacts of climate change, but it’s not without cost. Sea levels are rising because heat causes water to expand and ice to melt. ...if the Southern Ocean continues to account for the vast majority of ocean heat uptake until 2100, we might see its heat content increase by as much as seven times more than what we have already seen up to today. This will have enormous impacts around the globe, such as further disturbances to the Southern Ocean food web, rapid melting of Antarctic ice shelves and changes in the ocean conveyor belt.…

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