Boiling seas and scorched land
A study reveals 2024 saw record ocean warming, worsening the climate crisis and threatening marine life, coastal regions, and extreme weather events.
A multi-country study that mapped heating across eight oceanic regions has found that six of these were at their warmest in 2024. Some other datasets seem to concur. Oceanic warming broke records in 2023, too, which, in turn, surpassed the record high observed in 2022. In fact, every decade since 1984 — when satellite record-keeping of ocean temperatures started — has been warmer than the preceding one. This is the bleak backdrop to the succinct summation by Lijing Cheng, the lead researcher of the 2024 study: Broken records in the ocean have become a broken record.

It is the latter part of Cheng’s pithy observation that should worry us. Warmer oceans have cataclysmic disruptions in store, greatly exacerbating the unfolding climate crisis. The heating up of the oceans accounts for more than a third of the global mean sea level rise through thermal expansion, worsening sinking risks for coastal and island habitations. It intensifies extreme weather events such as typhoons and marine heatwaves, even as these become more frequent than historically observed, in seas they were practically unheard of — India, for instance, has been seeing cyclones batter its western coast in recent years, which had been safe from such phenomena for centuries. Then, there is the impact on marine ecosystems, already visible in many sensitive regions across the planet, including in Lakshadweep. With hotter seas comes oceanic deoxygenation — risking the health, indeed, survival, of marine life.
Unusual heating has several underlying factors, including the climatic phenomenon of El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). But there is no denying that anthropogenic factors are the most significant contributor to extreme air and sea surface warming. Indeed, 2024 marked not just the close of the hottest decade on record for the planet but also the first-ever breach of the 1.5°Ctarget. Cheng’s “broken record”, therefore, is also an idiom for the warnings sounded by climate experts on warming ever since climate action became a topic of global negotiation; while the warnings continue to intensify with the intensification of the climate crisis, it is the climate action so far and the proposals for the coming decades — or more exactly, the severe deficiencies these carry — that makes the warnings a broken record. The grim temperature recordings are a reminder of how little time there is to reset course and avert climate disaster.
