Boiling seas & scorched land

Record-high sea temperatures in 2024 show the gap between climate threat and action

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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.