This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Temperatures have warmed dramatically across the equatorial Pacific Ocean in 2026, signaling the onset of a strong and potentially historic El Niño. These events can affect weather around the world, and the intensity of recent El Niño events is raising alarm that, as global temperatures rise, they are becoming stronger and more destructive.
To understand how these climate patterns are changing, we need to understand what happened during El Niño events in the past, but observations go back only a few decades. So, my colleagues and I went to the Galápagos Islands—at the heart of the El Niño pattern—to find answers from some of nature's best record keepers: corals. In records preserved by living and ancient fossil corals, we found that, on average, El Niño events have been stronger in the past 40 years than at any time in the past millennium, with higher temperatures that lead to more powerful effects on weather.
That intensification also coincides with human-caused global warming. Our results, just published in the journal Science, suggest that the 1982–83 and 1997–98 El Niños—two of the strongest in recent memory—may be harbingers of more extreme events to come as the planet warms. One of the strongest El Niños hit in 1982, with devastating consequences for the Galápagos Islands.
It triggered a marine heat wave that reverberated through one of the most distinctive and unspoiled ecosystems on the planet. Exceptionally warm surface water blocked the usual upwelling of cool, nutrient-rich water that fuels the food chain for marine life. The result ravaged communities that rely on the ocean—fish, birds, marine mammals and people who fish for their livelihoods throughout the eastern tropical Pacific.
In the extraordinary heat, more than 95% of Galápagos corals died. The heat wave was caused by an exceptionally strong El Niño event, part of a climate pattern that begins in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, around the Galápagos Islands, as the trade winds shift. El Niño's warm ocean water alters the atmospheric circulation above, diverting storm tracks and changing patterns of floods, droughts and tropical storms around the globe.
The 1982–83 El Niño contributed to climate extremes worldwide, from flooding in Kenya and Peru to drought in Indonesia and Brazil, costing the global economy as much as US$4 trillion by some estimates. A similarly strong El Niño in 1997–98 resulted in 23,000 deaths from disease and climate disasters. But we wanted to know: Are such powerful El Niño events unusual in the context of history?
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