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Brian McNoldy (pictured) is an expert in hurricane formation at the University of Miami, and is tracking the latest temperature data from the North Atlantic. “The North Atlantic has been record-breakingly warm for almost a year now,” McNoldy said. “It’s just astonishing. Like, it doesn’t seem real.”

Across the unusually warm Atlantic, in Cambridge, England, Rob Larter, a marine scientist who tracks polar ice levels, is equally perplexed. …“We’re used to having a fairly good handle on things. But the impression at the moment is that things have gone further and faster than we expected. That’s an uncomfortable place as a scientist to be.” …“We all know that there’s been a rapid warming, particularly over the last few decades,” Larter said. “But it over the last 18 months, it’s jumped up beyond what we expected.”

McNoldy said it was too early to say whether the ongoing heat wave is part of the early stages of such a change. “I hope it’s not something much worse, like, you know, like some significant change in the ocean current,” he said. “That would have far greater implications.”

“The sea ice around the Antarctic is just not growing,” said Matthew England, a professor at the University of New South Wales who studies ocean currents. “The temperature’s just going off the charts. It’s like an omen of the future.”