Earth’s “biggest heat bucket.”

Coral reefs, octopi, eels, offshore oil rigs, El Niño, La Niña, the birthplace of life, tasty seafood, even assorted bottom feeders.

All these things come to mind when we think of the world’s ocean. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Institute for Space Studies have learned to think of the ocean as something else, something that might not occur to the rest of us.

The ocean, they say, is Earth’s “biggest heat bucket.” And like a bucket placed under an overflowing sink, the ocean is filling up with the heat that increasing levels of greenhouse gases are preventing from escaping to space.

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