Critics of climate change often claim that warming has stopped since the late 1990s. While this is categorically false (the last decade was the warmest on record and 2005 and 2010 are generally considered tied for the warmest year), scientists do admit that warming hasn’t occurred over land as rapidly as predicted in the last ten years, especially given continually rising greenhouse gas emissions. But a recent study in Geophysical Research Letters has found this so-called missing heat: 700 meters below the surface of the ocean.

“Increasingly in the past decade, more of that heat has been dumped at levels below 700 meters, where most previous analyses stop. About 30 percent has gone below 700 meters in depth,” explains co-author Kevin Trenberth with the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “This is fairly new, it is not there throughout the record.”

Scientists have long known that around 90 percent of the heat from climate change ends up in the oceans and they suspected that this was where the ‘missing heat’ would be found. The study find that climate change has revved up worldwide, instead of stopping.

“This signals the beginning of the most sustained warming trend in this record of [ocean heat content],” the scientists write in the paper. “Indeed, recent warming rates of the waters below 700 meters appear to be unprecedented.”