By Paul Huttner, Cody Nelson

MPR News/90.1 FM

The planet appears to be warming faster than scientists realized, and it’s happening beneath the oceans’ surface.

Oceans take the brunt of earth’s warming, but new research suggests they retain 60 percent more heat annually than past estimates — which indicates global warming is taking place faster than experts had known.

“We thought that we got away with not a lot of warming in both the ocean and the atmosphere for the amount of CO2 that we emitted,” Princeton University geoscientist Laure Resplandy told the Washington Post. “But we were wrong. The planet warmed more than we thought. It was hidden from us just because we didn’t sample it right. But it was there. It was in the ocean already.”

A recent report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, captured international attention for its grave warning: curtail warming now or face widespread deadly conditions for people and ecosystems as soon as 2030.

And that report didn’t even include this study from Resplandy and others who published their work Wednesday in Nature, a science journal.