Leon Simons created an Earth energy imbalance visualization to show what our rapidly warming planet is subject to. The Earth Energy Imbalance is due to the net amount of energy added to the Earth’s system. He used AI to create a visualisation of the EEI. Due to greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere, Earth now accumulates ~20 zettajoules (ZJs, which are joules with 21 zeros) of additional heat every year.

To read his work, head to Patreon https://www.patreon.com/posts/visualizing-with-110160733

Earth Energy Imbalance Visualization

This is (more or less) what one instant ZJ of heat would look like on Earth

How To Calculate EEI

• That’s as much energy as 16 million Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs (Little Boy = ~63 TJ) would produce.
• 20 ZJ is as much as 320 million ‘Little Boys’.
• Earth receives 20 Zj from the sun in about 32 hours. 20 ZJ / (340 W/m² x 510 trillion m² of the Earth’s surface)) / 3600 = 32 hours.
• 29% of that sunlight is reflected back to space, so it’s close to two days of absorbed sunlight.
• 20 ZJ is actually about 33 times the energy humanity uses every year (~0.6 ZJ).
• 20 ZJ is ten times the net primary production of the entire biosphere (~2 ZJ)

How Much?

Sea levels would rise by 15cm if that 20 ZJ of heat were directed to the melting of land ice. It would be like throwing a 40 km ice cube in the tropical Pacific Ocean and letting it melt:

Leon says AI makes errors. When asked about the sun’s energy, it eventually came to the correct number: 32 hours rather than 15 minutes of incoming sunlight.

Here is Grok with a prompt of I generated an image with the prompt: ‘atomic bomb explosion as seen from the international space station with energy of 20ZJ’.

More Reading 

• You can find Leon Simons article on Patreon, with another 40 km high ice cube added for good measure: https://www.patreon.com/posts/visualizing-with-110160733

Explanation from Grok

To check if this was consistent with the data, I asked Grok LLM for the same as Leon Simon (he used another LLM)(

Visualizing 1 zettajoule (ZJ) of energy on Earth involves understanding the scale and impact of such an enormous amount of energy. Here’s how you might conceptualize it:

• Energy Consumption Comparison: Humanity’s total annual energy consumption is roughly around 0.5 ZJ. Therefore, 1 ZJ is equivalent to about two years of global energy consumption by all humans combined. Imagine all the energy used by every person, industry, and machine on Earth for two full years—that’s 1 ZJ.
• Heat Energy in Oceans: The Earth’s oceans absorb a significant amount of heat due to global warming. For perspective, the oceans absorbed about 287 ZJ in 2023 alone. Visualizing 1 ZJ within this context, it’s like imagining a small fraction of the heat absorbed by the oceans in a year, which contributes to rising ocean temperatures.
• Atomic Bomb Equivalence: If we use the analogy of atomic bombs for visualization, considering the energy release of the Hiroshima bomb (about 63 TJ or 0.063 PJ), 1 ZJ would be equivalent to around 15.8 trillion Hiroshima bombs. However, this comparison might be less intuitive for visualizing due to its sheer scale.
• Solar Energy: The amount of solar energy reaching Earth in just 90 minutes is equivalent to all the energy humans consume in a year (about 0.5 ZJ). Thus, 1 ZJ would be roughly the solar energy hitting Earth in 180 minutes or three hours.
• Temperature Change: If you consider the energy required to change the temperature of water, 1 ZJ could theoretically raise the temperature of a volume of water equivalent to several Baltic Seas by 1°C, though this is a rough simplification due to the complexities of ocean dynamics and heat distribution.
• Visual Representation: If we were to visualize this energy in a more tangible form, imagine a sphere where each cubic meter represents a certain amount of energy (like 1 joule for simplicity, though this would make the sphere unimaginably large for 1 ZJ). However, for visualization, if each cubic meter represented a much larger unit, like a gigajoule (GJ), 1 ZJ would still be a sphere with a radius of about 1,260 kilometers, roughly the distance from New York to Denver, filled with energy.

This visualization helps in grasping the scale but remember, energy isn’t confined to such shapes in reality; it’s about understanding the magnitude. The actual impact of 1 ZJ on Earth would be catastrophic if released suddenly or could be subtle if spread out over time, like the gradual warming of oceans due to climate change.