Mystery heatwave warms Pacific Ocean to new record
Mystery heatwave warms Pacific Ocean to new record
The waters of the north Pacific have had their warmest summer on record, according to BBC analysis of a mysterious marine heatwave that has confounded climate scientists.
Sea surface temperatures between July and September were more than 0.25C above the previous high of 2022 - a big increase across an area roughly ten times the size of the Mediterranean.
While climate change is known to make marine heatwaves more likely, scientists are struggling to explain why the north Pacific has been so hot for so long.
But all this extra heat in the so-called "warm blob" may have the opposite effect in the UK, possibly making a colder start to winter more likely, some researchers believe.
"There's definitely something unusual going on in the north Pacific," said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a research group in the US.
Such a jump in temperatures across a region so large is "quite remarkable", he added.
The BBC analysed data from the European Copernicus climate service to calculate average temperatures between July and September across a large area of the north Pacific, sometimes known as the "warm blob".
The region extends from the east coast of Asia to the west coast of North America, the same area used in previous scientific studies .
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