The Hidden Ocean Patch That Broke Climate Records

Nothing has caused climate scientists quite as much recent trouble as the so-called “global warming hiatus.” Not only did this approximately 14-year lull in the rise of global mean (or average) temperatures provide fodder for a variety of misguided climate change deniers (there have been other, longer pauses), but it also represented a genuine scientific mystery. Scientists knew it was being caused by falling ocean temperatures, but they also knew that the ocean, as a whole, was warming. Where was the extra heat being stored, and when would it make itself known?

Then this past November Axel Timmermann, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii’s International Pacific Research Center, announced that global mean temperatures had finally resumed their rise, driven mainly by an unprecedented spike in sea surface temperatures in the northeast Pacific.

This unexpected shot of heat showed up in late 2013 as a discrete orange blob in satellite imagery, and by the end of last summer, sea surface temperatures as far north as the Gulf of Alaska were the highest ever recorded. So too was the global mean temperature for 2014. While it will take more time to see if the record represents the beginning of a renewed warming trend, Timmermann makes no bones about it—he believes that the blob has ended the hiatus.

The story of the blob starts with an unlikely protagonist: a vast pool of warm water, thousands of kilometers wide and more than