The heat wave, the worst recorded on record, has raised alarm among scientists and the looming extreme dangers as it looks like this year will be the hottest Earth temperature on record, the Washington Post reports.

New data has emerged in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their rapid evolution: Historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak.

Unprecedentedly low levels of sea ice around Antarctica, where the effects of global warming have so far been slow to show up, while the planet experiences its warmest June on record, according to new data.

And then Monday was recorded as Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years only to be toppled the next day after Tuesday was even hotter.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Agency, pointing out that any number of charts and graphs of Earth’s climate show, quite literally, that “we are in uncharted territory.”

The acceleration of global warming is not a shock, scientists expected it would come with the appearance of El Nino, the phenomenon that reappeared last month. The phenomenon is known for releasing heat and moisture waves that cause extreme floods and storms in some places and droughts and wildfires in others.

But the warm conditions are developing too quickly, and over much of the planet, to be explained solely by El Niño. Records are falling around the world many months before the peak of El Niño, which usually hits in December and sends global temperatures skyrocketing for months to come.

“We’re seeing unprecedented extremes in the recent past, even without being in this phase,” said Claudia Tebaldi, an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. With the influence of El Niño, “the probability of seeing something unprecedented is even higher,” he said.

In recent weeks, extreme weather has included record-breaking heat waves in China, where Beijing topped 40 degrees Celsius for the first time, and in Mexico and Texas, where authorities scrambled to maintain the power grid.

Smoke from wildfires that has repeatedly choked parts of the United States this summer is a visible reminder of the unusually warm spring and unusually dry weather that have fueled an unprecedented wildfire season in Canada, which saw its hottest May and June.

Ocean heat is expected during El Niño, which is characterized by unusually warm sea surface temperatures along the equatorial Pacific. But the extreme heat extends far beyond this zone, including in the North Pacific, around New Zealand and across most of the Atlantic.

Heatwave conditions covered about 40 percent of the world’s oceans in June, the largest extent on record, NOAA said. This footprint is only expected to grow, and is projected to reach 50 percent of ocean water by September.

Huge difference compared to previous limbs

It’s not just that the records are being broken, but also the huge difference that is being made compared to the previous extremes, the scientists note. In parts of the North Atlantic, temperatures are up to 5 degrees Celsius above normal, the warmest seen there for more than 170 years. Warm waters in north-west Europe, including the UK, led to the hottest June on record.

New data released by the Copernicus center on Thursday showed that global surface air temperatures were 0.53 degrees Celsius above the June 1991-2020 average. That was more than a tenth of a degree Celsius above the previous record.

Antarctic sea ice, meanwhile, reached its lowest extent in June since satellite records began, 17 percent below the 1991-2020 average, according to Copernicus. The previous record, set a year earlier, was about 9 percent below average.