Every few years, El Niño or its cool counterpart, La Niña, shifts rainfall across the tropics, dries out Australia, floods parts of Peru, and rearranges the weather on most of the planet. The two are the warm and cold swings of a single system, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, and that system is the largest source of year-to-year climate variation on Earth. Its swings sit atop the steadily rising temperatures driven by global warming.
But we didn’t know whether global warming was making it stronger. It’s possible that the added energy in the atmosphere and oceans was causing its swings to be more dramatic. Because models disagree with one another and the instrumental data are too short to separate a trend, Cole’s team reconstructed a thousand-year-long ocean surface temperature record by analyzing fossilized Galápagos corals.
It turns out that El Niño in the eastern Pacific has never been as violent as it is now. And a little surprising, actually.” The Galápagos sit in the bullseye of the eastern Pacific ENSO pattern, where the biggest events have their strongest impact. It is also one of very few options to look for fossilized corals in the region.
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