The oceans are weirdly hot. Scientists are trying to figure out why

AUGUST 14, 2024 5:00 AM ET
Rebecca Hersher

The oceans are extremely warm right now. Worldwide, average ocean temperatures were in record-breaking territory for 15 months straight since last April.

That’s bad news on multiple fronts. Abnormally hot ocean water helps fuel dangerous hurricanes, like Hurricane Ernesto, which is expected to rapidly gain strength this week in the Atlantic, and like Hurricane Debby, which dumped massive amounts of rain along the East Coast of the U.S. last week. And when the water gets too hot, fish and other marine species also struggle to survive. For example, the ocean water near Florida is so warm that it’s threatening coral reefs.

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“The two primary things are obviously global warming and El Niño,” says Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M. But that’s where the certainty ends, because the oceans are even warmer than scientists expected from those two trends.

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It seems like there probably was another suspect. And over the last 18 months or so, a few major theories have emerged about what it might be. Testing those theories is slow, laborious work for scientists, but after months of crunching the numbers, some early answers are emerging.

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