Ocean temperature doesn't just respond to a warming atmosphere, it also stores the overwhelming majority of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases, over 90% of it. This animation shows the linear trend in sea surface temperature (ERA5 reanalysis, 1940-2025, 86 years of data) across the globe, in K/decade. Land is shown in flat gray; the trend is oceanic only.

As with the previous globes in this series: the bulging and sinking is a visual amplification of the color, not a physical deformation, and the color itself carries no shading or lighting effects, so what you see is exactly what the data says, nothing softened or intensified by the angle of view.

The ocean warms more slowly and unevenly than land, its huge heat capacity buffers the swings that continents experience. Even so, the pattern is far from flat: some regions are warming markedly faster than the global ocean average, while the North Atlantic subpolar gyre, the famous "warming hole", has resisted the trend for decades, a signature tied to a weakening subpolar circulation. It's one of the few regions on Earth's surface bucking the trend so persistently.

Data: ERA5, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S)