Why Does The Ocean Matter For Climate?

Written By Teacher: Elaine Makarevich

Elaine is a New Jersey educator with 30 years of teaching experience in grades K-6. The earth and the natural world have always been a focus of her life and throughout her career as her students learned critical lessons about their planet when visiting her indoor or outdoor classrooms.

The ocean plays a crucial role in regulating the Earth’s climate, making it an essential topic for students to understand. It acts as a massive heat and carbon sink, absorbing much of the energy and CO2 produced by human activities. Teaching this topic can be complex because it involves explaining large-scale systems like ocean currents, carbon cycling, and their intricate connections to climate change. Resources like MIT’s explanation of the ocean’s importance, SubjectToClimate’s Ocean Habitat Changes Lesson for K-2 students, and the Warmer Water and Rising Sea Levels Experiment provide engaging, hands-on approaches to teaching younger students.

For grades 6-8, resources like SubjectToClimate’s A Warming Gulf of Maine: Investigating Impacts on Predators and Prey help students dive into the specific effects of ocean warming on ecosystems. The Ocean Acidification Lesson with Lab for grades 9-12 further delves into advanced topics, enabling high school students to explore the intricate relationship between the ocean and climate change. By fostering curiosity and critical thinking, these resources equip students of all ages to understand and address the challenges facing our oceans and planet.

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

Since the 1700s, humans have raised the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by almost 50%, trapping a huge amount of heat on Earth. But only a tiny fraction of that heat has actually stayed in the air. “The ocean has taken up about 90% of the heat that’s been trapped in our atmosphere,” says Dr. Stephanie Dutkiewicz, senior research scientist at the MIT Center for Global Change Science, whose research focuses on phytoplankton in oceans. Without the ocean absorbing heat, our planet’s air temperature would be changing much faster.

Why does the ocean absorb so much heat? It’s because water molecules can take in much more heat than the molecules in the air. “Think about the fact that if you stay in the water too long, you get very cold because the water is taking your heat,” says Dutkiewicz. “But if you stay in the air, you don’t really feel that different.”

Not only has the ocean absorbed heat, but it is also estimated that it has absorbed one third of the carbon dioxide humans have emitted since the industrial revolution. Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is the most important greenhouse gas driving climate change. As we’ve added extra CO2 to the atmosphere, much of it has dissolved in the ocean’s surface waters, in an attempt to bring the atmosphere and ocean CO2 back into equilibrium.