2024 SE Asian Land And Ocean Heatwave Hit 40 Million KM2 - An Area 5X The Size Of Australia
Almost 40 million sq kilometres of ocean around south-east Asia and the Pacific – an area five times the size of Australia – was engulfed in a marine heatwave in 2024, a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report has revealed.
WMO scientists said the record heat – on land and in the ocean – was mostly driven by the climate crisis and coincided with a string of extreme weather events, from deadly landslides in the Philippines to floods in Australia and rapid glacier loss in Indonesia.
The region was 0.48C hotter than the average recorded between 1991 and 2020, the WMO’s State of the Climate report stated. Satellite measurements showed sea levels were rising almost 4mm per year – “significantly higher” than the global average of 3.5mm, the report said.
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The ocean heat also drove the fifth mass coral bleaching across Australia’s Great Barrier Reef since 2016, causing widespread coral death. Assoc Prof Alex Sen Gupta, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales, said the heatwave was “pretty remarkable” and was part of a record-breaking jump in ocean temperatures globally that started in 2023. “We’ve really never seen anything like it and we’re struggling to explain why we saw such a big jump,” Sen Gupta said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/05/marine-heatwave-found-to-have-engulfed-area-of-ocean-five-times-the-size-of-australia