‘7.6 billion mugs of tea a second’: a new way to make sense of the heat pouring into our oceans

The ocean is heating up faster than ever. In twenty twenty-five, per The Conversation, the world's oceans absorbed twenty-three zettajoules of energy—a figure so vast that researchers created a more intuitive comparison. Heating a mug of tea requires about one hundred thousand joules. Scale that to global ocean heat, and you get seven point six billion mugs of tea pouring into the sea every second—almost one per person on Earth. This acceleration is driven by greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere since the industrial era, and it's raising sea levels, intensifying marine heat waves, and melting polar ice.

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