The year 2020 — which saw the continuing coronavirus pandemic as well as massive wildfires across Australia, Siberia and the United States — also tied the record for the hottest year on record, a new NASA study shows.

Up until this past year, 2016 ranked as the warmest year on record for planet Earth. 2020 surpassed this previous record by a very small amount, under one-tenth of a degree, the agency announced Thursday (Jan. 14). However, the difference between the two years is within the margin of error, NASA officials added, making them effectively a tie.

"This year has been a very striking example of what it’s like to live under some of the most severe effects of climate change that we've been predicting," Lesley Ott, a research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a second NASA statement.