Wednesday June 14, 2023
PhysOrg —
In a world of worsening climate extremes, a single red line has caught many people’s attention.
The line, which charts sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean, went viral over the weekend for its startling display of unprecedented warming—nearly 2 degrees (1.09 Celsius) above the mean dating back to 1982, the earliest year with comparable data.
Ocean temperatures are so anomalously high that Eliot Jacobson, a retired mathematics professor who created the graph using data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had to “increase the upper bound on the y-axis,” he said.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time, but this one was like, ‘Oh my God, look at this,'” Jacobson said of the graph. “What is going on here?”