The world's oceans have been soaking up far more excess heat in recent decades than scientists realized, suggesting that Earth could be set to warm even faster than predicted in the years ahead, according to new research published Wednesday.

Over the past quarter century, the Earth's oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than scientists previously had thought, said Laure Resplandy, a geoscientist at Princeton University who led the startling study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The difference represents an enormous amount of additional energy, originating from the sun and trapped by the Earth's atmosphere – more than 8 times the world's energy consumption, year after year.

In the scientific realm, the new findings help to resolve long-running doubts about the rate of the warming of the oceans prior to 2007, when reliable measurements from devices called “Argo floats” were put to use worldwide. Before that, different types of temperature records – and an overall lack of them – contributed to murkiness about how quickly the oceans were heating up.

The higher-than-expected amount of heat in the oceans means more heat is being retained within the Earth's climate system each year, rather than escaping into space. In essence, more heat in the oceans signals that global warming itself is more advanced than scientists thought.

“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,” said Resplandy, who published the work with experts from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and several other institutions in the U.S., China, France, and Germany. “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.”

Wednesday's study also could have important policy implications. If ocean temperatures are rising more rapidly than previously calculated, that could leave nations even less time to dramatically cut the world's emissions of carbon dioxide, in hopes of limiting global warming to the ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

The world already has warmed 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century. Scientists backed by the United Nations reported last month that with warming projected to steadily increase, the world faces a daunting challenge in trying to limit that warming to only another half-degree Celsius. The group found that it would take “unprecedented” action by leaders across the globe over the coming decade to even have a shot at that goal.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued to roll back regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions from vehicles, coal plants and other sources, and has said it intends to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. In one instance, the administration relied on an assumption that the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, by the end of the century in arguing that a proposal to ease vehicle fuel-efficiency standards would have only minor climate impacts.

The new research underscores the potential consequences of global inaction. Faster warming oceans mean that seas will rise faster and that more heat will be delivered to critical locations that already are facing the effects of a warming climate, such as coral reefs in the tropics and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

Paul Durack, a research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said Wednesday's study offers “a really interesting new insight” but is “quite alarming.”

The warming found in the study is “more than twice the rates of long-term warming estimates from 1960s and '70s to the present,” Durack said, adding that if these rates are validated by further studies, “it means the rate of warming and the sensitivity of the earth's system to greenhouse gases is at the upper end.” He said that if scientists have underestimated the amount of heat taken up by the oceans, “it will mean we need to go back to the drawing board” on the aggressiveness of mitigation actions the world needs to take promptly to limit future warming.

Beyond the long-term implications of warmer oceans, Russell added that in the short-term, even small changes in ocean temperatures can affect weather in specific places. For instance, scientists have said warmer oceans off the coast of New England have contributed to more intense winter storms.

“We're only just now discovering how important ocean warming is to our daily lives, to our daily weather,” she said.