How hot would it be without oceans?
The ocean is also crucial in controlling atmospheric temperatures: without the ocean and its diversity of service provision, Earth's maximum temperature would exceed 100°C , and the average surface temperature, which is currently around 15°C, would instead be around 50°C .
But on the surface, plants and animals would begin to die out immediately. While trees can survive for a while without water, eventually everything would become so dry that fires would span the continents.
Covering more than 70% of Earth's surface, our global ocean has a very high heat capacity. It has absorbed 90% of the warming that has occurred in recent decades due to increasing greenhouse gases, and the top few meters of the ocean store as much heat as Earth's entire atmosphere.
We all rely on the ocean, whether we know it or not. Earth's vast expanses of water are key to the success of all life on Earth. We eat fish from the ocean, we breathe the oxygen it gives off, we feel the warmth of its huge currents. Without a healthy ocean, humans cannot thrive.
Thus, ocean currents regulate global climate, helping to counteract the uneven distribution of solar radiation reaching Earth's surface. Without currents in the ocean, regional temperatures would be more extreme — super hot at the equator and frigid toward the poles — and much less of Earth's land would be habitable.
The world will be able to catch an additional 10 million metric tons of fish in 2050 if management stays as effective as it is today, says the report. But increasing catches without significantly improving management risks the health of predator species and could destabilize entire ecosystems.
The ocean is a large mass of salt water that covers almost 3/4th of the earth's surface. In the absence of it, the water cycle would cease to exist, and life on the planet's surface would perish as food chains collapsed. Bacteria that live deep down may be the only living organisms that survive.
The World Meteorological Organization tracks land surface temperature records, but not ones set at sea. Experts have pointed to a reading of 99.7 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded in the middle of Kuwait Bay in 2020 and reported in a 2020 research paper, as the world record to date.
Y e s , the Arctic Ocean is the coldest ocean, even colder than the waters surrounding Antarctica. Since the Arctic ocean always has sea ice even during summer, the temperature of the surface is...
The eight warmest years on record have now occurred since 2014, the scientists, from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, reported, and 2016 remains the hottest year ever.
What will the ocean look like in 2050?
There are increasing high levels of man-made pollution in many of the world's seas and little actually disappears. By 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the world's oceans. We live on a blue planet; the world's oceans cover three quarters of the Earth.
So, while there may be fewer fish in the oceans by 2048 (due to overfishing, loss of habitat, pollution, extinctions, etc.) our great grand children will still be able to go to lakes streams and oceans and see fish. The overwhelming consensus in fisheries scientists is that this is not true.
Modern estimates suggest that the transport of water to the surface is five times smaller than water movement to the mantle, so that the Earth will lose all its sea-water in one billion years from now.
Notably, all ocean basins have been experiencing significant warming since 1998, with more heat being transferred deeper into the ocean since 1990. To date, the ocean contains 90 percent of the heat from human-induced global warming, and the year 2022 was the warmest ever measured for the global ocean.
Data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that the average global sea surface temperature – the temperature of the upper few metres of the ocean – has increased by approximately 0.13°C per decade over the past 100 years.
Over the past 100 years, global temperatures have risen about 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F), with sea level response to that warming totaling about 160 to 210 mm (with about half of that amount occurring since 1993), or about 6 to 8 inches.
The world's oceans could virtually be emptied for fish by 2048. A study shows that if nothing changes, we will run out of seafood for normal consumption in 2048.
By 2030, there could be 300 million tons of plastic in the oceans. A new report from WWF International warns that the amount of plastic waste in the world's oceans will reach 300 million tons by 2030.
A quarter of the world's freshwater fish are at risk of extinction, according to the first comprehensive assessment of the animals by the world's leading scientific authority on the status of species.
Ocean salt primarily comes from rocks on land and openings in the seafloor. Salt in the ocean comes from two sources: runoff from the land and openings in the seafloor. Rocks on land are the major source of salts dissolved in seawater. Rainwater that falls on land is slightly acidic, so it erodes rocks.
How deep is the ocean?
The average depth of the ocean is about 3,682 meters (12,080 feet). The deepest part of the ocean is called the Challenger Deep and is located beneath the western Pacific Ocean in the southern end of the Mariana Trench, which runs several hundred kilometers southwest of the U.S. territorial island of Guam.
About 71 percent of the Earth's surface is water-covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth's water. Water also exists in the air as water vapor, in rivers and lakes, in icecaps and glaciers, in the ground as soil moisture and in aquifers, and even in you and your dog.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest ocean basin on Earth, covering more than 155 million square kilometers (60 million square miles) and averaging a depth of 4,000 meters (13,000 feet).
The South Pacific and South Atlantic Oceans are the least polluted.
Externally, the upper limit of the human body's thermoneutral zone—the ambient temperature range in which the body can maintain effectively maintain its temperature and equilibrium—likely falls somewhere between 104 and 122 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a 2021 study published in Physiology Report.
