At a Glance

In 2019, Earth's oceans were the warmest in recorded human history.The rate of warming exploded in the past three decades.The heat added in the past 25 years equals 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions.

The heating of the world's oceans is accelerating to a rate that is equal to five Hiroshima nuclear bombs being dropped into the water every second, researchers say.

A study published this week in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences found that in recorded human history.

In addition, the research found, the past five years were the five warmest years in the ocean historically with modern instruments, and the past 10 years were also the top 10 years on record.

The study looked at ocean temperatures since the 1950s, from the surface to about 6,500 feet deep. Between 1955 and 1986, the temperature increases were pretty steady. But between 1987 and 2019, warming was about 450% greater than the previous period.

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The researchers see the results as "irrefutable" evidence of global warming.

"The oceans are really what ," team member John Abraham, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, told the Guardian. "Using the oceans, we see a continued, uninterrupted and accelerating warming rate of planet Earth. This is dire news."

"There are no reasonable alternatives, aside from the human emissions of heat-trapping gases, ," Lijing Cheng, the paper's lead author and an associate professor at the International Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CNN.

To reach the temperature the oceans reached in 2019, Cheng said, they would have taken in 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – or 228 sextillion – joules of heat.

"The Hiroshima atom-bomb exploded with an energy of about 63,000,000,000,000 Joules," Cheng told CNN. "I did a calculation ... the amount of heat we have put in the world's oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions."

Another way of looking at it is that it's equal to dropping about four Hiroshima bombs into the oceans every second over the past 25 years.

But remember, the rate of heating has accelerated.

"We are now at five to six Hiroshima bombs of heat each second," Abraham said.

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