Recently, a research team led by Prof. Jing Zhao from the Frontier Science Center of Deep Ocean Multispheres and Earth System made important progress in ocean thermal energy and climate change, assessing changes in the prospective reserves of ocean thermal energy under global warming and revealing its regulation mechanism for the first time. The research results were reported online by Nature Communications.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewable and clean energy has become a major solution to the greenhouse gas problem. Clean and stable, ocean thermal energy is abundant, making it a renewable source of energy source with great potential. The density of ocean thermal energy depends on the temperature difference between seawater on the surface and that at a 1,000-meter depth. Existing studies show that, under the background of global warming, there is still a lack of fundamental understanding of the quantitative changes in future ocean thermal energy and its regulation mechanism.
Based on high-resolution Earth system model developed by OUC, this study is the first to assess the future evolution of global reserves of ocean thermal energy. Because of the high-carbon emissions worldwide, the reserves of ocean thermal energy are expected to increase by 46% by the end of the century due to the increased density and availability of ocean thermal energy. The difference in heat budget is most pronounced in the Atlantic Ocean, mainly due to the weakening of eddy-induced vertical heat transport (EVHT) under global warming, which leads to accelerated warming at greater depths.
This study is important for the future exploitation of ocean thermal energy, and sheds light on future changes in the Earth's climate system.
