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‘A Little Shocking’: Ocean Currents Are Speeding up Significantly, Study Finds
Olivia Rosane Feb. 06, 2020 09:13AM EST OCEANS

The world's oceans are getting faster, a new study has found. gcalebjones / Public Domain
The world's oceans are moving faster, and researchers think it might be another sign of the climate crisis.

A new paper, published in Science Advances Wednesday, found that 76 percent of the top 2,000 meters of the ocean appears to have sped up since the 1990s, largely because of wind speeds. And the ocean's speedup is more than can be explained by "natural variability."

"The Earth is our patient, and you look for symptoms of how it is reacting to anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing," study coauthor and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researcher Michael McPhaden told The Washington Post. "This is another symptom."

Each ocean current moves as much water as all the world's rivers combined, Science Magazine explained. Researchers found that between 1990 and 2013, the energy of these currents increased by 15 percent per decade.

"This is a really huge increase," Susan Wijffels, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved with the paper, told Science Magazine.

At the same time, wind speed has increased by around two percent per decade and ocean current speed by around five percent per decade, according to The Washington Post.