Science Snippets: Gulf of Mexico Warming Twice as Fast as Global Ocean

Draft script:

From Yale Climate Connections on 13 May 2026 comes a story titled Something startling is happening in the Gulf of Mexico. The subhead reads “Its waters are heating up twice as fast as the global oceans, with huge implications for hurricane risk.”

Here’s the lede, which draws in the reader: “In 2012, the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico began rising along a shocking upward trajectory.” The following paragraph provides the reason for concern: “Climate change is causing oceans worldwide to warm. But that year, summertime sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico began heating up at about twice the rate seen in the global oceans. The trend has continued into the 2020s, with sea surface temperatures hitting record highs in both 2024 and 2025. The shift has huge implications for the hurricanes that form in the Gulf – and the people who live along its shores and on the islands that dot its waters.”

The following paragraph adds to the concern and provides a numerical approach: “Hurricanes are heat engines that take heat energy out of the ocean and convert it to the kinetic energy of wind. The maximum intensity that a hurricane can reach increases by about 5-7% per degree Celsius of sea surface temperature increase. So the rise of about half a degree per decade in Gulf sea surface temperatures per decade since 2012 may be causing a 3% per decade increase in the winds of the strongest hurricanes. Because stronger winds cause more destruction, this equates to about a 30% increase in hurricane damage per decade for these strongest storms.”

The following paragraph adds to the cause for concern: “When a hurricane traverses a shallow area of warm ocean waters, its powerful winds churn up cold waters from the depths, cooling the surface and putting the brakes on the storm’s intensification. But when unusually warm ocean waters extend 100 meters or more below the surface, the hurricane’s winds simply stir up more warm water, in some cases allowing dangerous rapid intensification to occur. This phenomenon fueled Hurricane Helene’s furious winds as the storm bore down on Florida in 2024.”

Finally, the questions begin: “So why have sea surface temperatures been rising so rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico? Will the temperatures keep rising? And what does it all mean for hurricanes?”

Beneath a subsection titled “Global warming and ocean current changes are to blame” we find nine paragraphs of additional explanation. Links to two peer-reviewed papers are embedded: “The cause of the Gulf’s warming trend is not just climate change, but also the behavior of a wide ribbon of water called the Loop Current.

This ocean current transports warm Caribbean water through the Yucatan Channel between Cuba and Mexico, northward into the Gulf of Mexico, in a loop southeastward just south of the Florida Keys – where it is called the Florida Current – and then just west of the westernmost Bahamas. There, the waters of the Loop Current flow northward along the U.S. coast and become the Gulf Stream.

With speeds of about 1.8 mph (0.8 m/s), the Loop Current is one of the fastest currents in the Atlantic Ocean. During summer and fall, its deep, warm waters can provide a huge energy source that fuels rapidly intensifying major hurricanes. Rapid intensification is dangerous because when storms strengthen quickly, they can take people by surprise, leaving little time for preparation or evacuation.

The Loop Current often bulges out in the northern Gulf of Mexico, where it sometimes sheds a clockwise-rotating ring of warm water that separates from the main current. This ring of warm water – called a Loop Current ring, Loop Current eddy, or warm core ring – slowly drifts west-southwestward toward Texas or Mexico at two to three miles per day.

The Loop Current pulsates in a quasi-regular fashion, shedding rings every six to 11 months. When a Loop Current eddy breaks off in the Gulf of Mexico at the height of hurricane season, it can provide a vast reservoir of energy to any hurricane that crosses over.

A 2024 paper, Loop Current Eddies as a Possible Cause of the Rapid Sea Level Rise in the Gulf of Mexico, found that in recent years, Loop Current eddies have been growing larger – in fact, their surface area increased by about 50% compared to previous decades. As a result, they’re transporting more warm water into the Gulf, raising sea surface temperatures and sea levels.

That explains the spike in temperatures. But why are the eddies getting larger?

A 2023 paper theorized that the huge clockwise-spinning ocean current system spanning most of the North Atlantic Ocean, called the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, had expanded, causing the Loop Current to transport more warm water into the Gulf of Mexico. The authors concluded that about 40% of this shift was from climate change and about 60% was from natural variability.

They predicted that this effect would die down within the next decade or so, reducing the amount of warm water being transported into the Gulf of Mexico. If they’re right, the rate at which warm water is being delivered to the Gulf will likely decline within the next five or so years, making the Gulf’s rising temperature closer to the global average increase.”

The embedded 2024 peer-reviewed paper is titled Loop Current Eddies as a Possible Cause of the Rapid Sea Level Rise in the Gulf of Mexico. It was created by three scholars, and is published in JGR Oceans. It is open-access. I will skip the Abstract because the Plain Language Summary provides an excellent overview: “While it is generally accepted that global … [sea level] is rising as a result of climate change, the rate of rise varies depending on the ocean area being studied. Using devices called tide gauges, researchers have shown that the … [sea level] has risen sharply along the densely populated coasts of the … [Gulf of Mexico]. However, little research has been done on the causes of this phenomenon throughout the basin. Oceanographers know that … [sea level] variations depend on several parameters such as heat input. Indeed, the warmer the water, the more its volume increases, leading to a rise in … [sea level]. Using satellite data, we show that the surface waters of the Gulf have warmed since the early 2010s, and that … [sea level] rise there is faster than in the adjacent Caribbean where no such warming has occurred. This difference may be related to the large warm-water eddies generated by the Loop Current. Indeed, the larger the eddies, the more heat they carry with them. Yet, our results show that the size of these eddies has increased in recent years and that they could be a major contributor to the surface water warming and ultimately to the … [sea level] rise in the area.”

The 2023 embedded, peer-reviewed paper is also open-access. It was created by nine scholars and titled Acceleration of U.S. Southeast and Gulf coast sea-level rise amplified by internal climate variability. The Abstract tells the tale: “While there is evidence for an acceleration in global mean sea level … since the 1960s, its detection at local levels has been hampered by the considerable influence of natural variability on the rate of … mean sea level change. Here we report a mean sea level acceleration in tide gauge records along the U.S. Southeast and Gulf coasts that has led to rates (>10 mm yr⁻¹ since 2010) that are unprecedented in at least 120 years. We show that this acceleration is primarily induced by an ocean dynamic signal exceeding the externally forced response from historical climate model simulations. However, when the simulated forced response is removed from observations, the residuals are neither historically unprecedented nor inconsistent with internal variability in simulations. A large fraction of the residuals is consistent with wind driven Rossby waves in the tropical North Atlantic. This indicates that this ongoing acceleration represents the compounding effects of external forcing and internal climate variability.”

There you have it: bad news followed by more bad news. The ongoing impacts of global climate change include land and sea. My advice remains the same: live as though our time is short.