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Since 2018, a<\/span> group of researchers from around the world have crunched the numbers on how much heat the world\u2019s oceans<\/a> are absorbing<\/a> each year. In 2025, their measurements broke records once again, making this the eighth year in a row that the world\u2019s oceans have absorbed more heat than the years before.<\/p>\n The study, which was published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, found that the world\u2019s oceans absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules\u2019 worth of heat in 2025, the most in any year since modern measurements began in the 1960s. That\u2019s significantly higher than the 16 additional zettajoules they absorbed in 2024. The research comes from a team of more than 50 scientists across the United States, Europe, and China.<\/p>\n A joule is a common way to measure energy. A single joule is a relatively small unit of measurement\u2014it\u2019s about enough<\/a> to power a tiny lightbulb for a second, or slightly heat a gram of water. But a zettajoule is one sextillion<\/em> joules; numerically, the 23 zettajoules the oceans absorbed this year can be written out as 23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.<\/p>\n John Abraham, a professor of thermal science at the University of St. Thomas and one of the authors on the paper, says that he sometimes has trouble putting this number into contexts laypeople understand. Abraham offers up a couple options. His favorite is comparing the energy stored in the ocean to the energy of atomic bombs: The 2025 warming, he says, is the energetic equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean. (Some other calculations he\u2019s done include equating this number to the energy it would take to boil 2 billion Olympic swimming pools, or more than 200 times the electrical use of everyone on the planet.)<\/p>\n \u201cLast year was a bonkers, crazy warming year\u2014that’s the technical term,\u201d Abraham joked to me. \u201cThe peer-reviewed scientific term is \u2018bonkers\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n The world\u2019s oceans are its largest heat sink, absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess warming that is trapped in the atmosphere. While some of the excess heat warms the ocean\u2019s surface, it also slowly travels further down into deeper parts of the ocean, aided by circulation and currents.<\/p>\n Global temperature calculations\u2014like the ones used to determine the hottest years on record\u2014usually only capture measurements taken at the ocean\u2019s surface. (The study finds that overall sea surface temperatures in 2025 were slightly lower than they were in 2024, which is on record as the hottest year<\/a> since modern records began. Some meteorological phenomena, like El Ni\u00f1o events, can also raise sea surface temperatures in certain regions, which can cause the overall ocean to absorb slightly less heat in a given year. This helps to explain why there was such a big jump in added ocean heat content between 2025, which developed a weak La Ni\u00f1a at the end of the year, and 2024, which came at the end of a strong El Ni\u00f1o year.) While sea surface temperatures have risen since the industrial revolution, thanks to our use of fossil fuels, these measurements don\u2019t provide a full picture of how climate change is affecting the oceans.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the whole world was covered by a shallow ocean that was only a couple feet deep, it would warm up more or less at the same speed as the land,\u201d says Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and a coauthor of the study. \u201cBut because so much of that heat is going down in the deep ocean, we see generally slower warming of sea surface temperatures [than those on land].\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n