Pandemic-related strikes may have avoided some greenhouse gas emissions into the Earth's atmosphere last year, but the world continued to be quite warm.

Water temperature measurements around the world show that by 2020 the amount of total heat stored in the upper oceans was higher than any other year recorded since 1955, researchers reported online in the Atmospheric Science on January 13th.

Ocean temperature monitoring is important because hot water from the edges of Greenland and Antarctica melts more ice, which raises sea levels and supercharges tropical storms.

Using Moore sensors, Arco floats, underwater robots and other instrumentation sliding probes, the researchers estimated the total thermal energy stored over 2,000 meters above the Earth's oceans.

The team found that seawater in 2020 will have 234 sextillion or 1021 higher thermal energy in 2020 than the annual average from 1981 to 2010. Thermal energy storage was from 20 Sextillion joules from 2019 - enough to boil 1.3 billion kettles of water that will be absorbed by the Earth’s oceans by 2020.