While the global ocean heat content has been rising, the regional ocean heat content exhibits substantial variations on various temporal and spatial scales. Over the past decade, the southeastern Pacific has experienced pronounced ocean warming, accompanied by accelerated ocean heat accumulation and an increasing occurrence of record-breaking sea level and sea surface temperature anomalies. This study demonstrates that these extreme events are successive manifestations of the ongoing regional warming rather than isolated climate anomalies. Although differing in their surface forcing and tropical precursors, the events share a common dynamical framework governing the evolution of regional ocean heat content. In both cases, thermosteric expansion associated with persistent subsurface heat accumulation accounts for the extreme sea level anomalies. Ocean heat budget analyses reveal that anomalous surface turbulent heat fluxes initiate upper-ocean warming, while horizontal heat advection and wind-driven downwelling redistribute and store heat in the southeastern Pacific, sustaining the long-lived increase in ocean heat content. The associated oceanic responses are consistently linked to persistent anticyclonic wind anomalies over the South Pacific. While the large-scale atmospheric forcing originates from different tropical basins, Rossby wave teleconnections establish the anomalous circulation, and the Southern Hemisphere zonal wave-3 variability further modulates its phase and spatial evolution, reinforcing regional air–sea coupling and ocean heat accumulation. These results provide a unified dynamical framework linking decadal ocean warming with successive regional extremes in the southeastern Pacific, offering new insights into Southern Ocean heat uptake, regional sea level variability, and the physical processes regulating marine biogeochemical and carbon uptake.

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