Image
courtesy of NOAA.
Joel Kontinen
A super El
Niño that is gathering strength in the
Pacific Ocean may
have been made worse by climate change, according to new analysis of coral records that suggest El Niños have become more intense as global temperatures
have climbed.
Julia Cole at the University of Michigan
and her colleagues hope corals can provide the answer. They collected living
and dead corals from around the Galapagos Islands in the eastern Pacific ocean,
where El Niños first develop.
They used
uranium and thorium dating to identify the age of the corals, then analysed the
chemistry of their skeletons to track changes to sea temperatures during their
lifetime. In that way, they built a time series of sea surface temperatures in
the eastern Pacific spanning the past 1000 years.
El Niño and
La Niña events are measured by changes to sea surface temperatures in the
Pacific, so by building this time series, Cole and her colleagues could track
the fluctuating ENSO cycle through the centuries.
Climate change and evolution seem to be trends of
the day.
Source:
Madeleine Cuff 2026 Galapagos corals suggest climate change drives stronger El Niños | New Scientist 27 August
Posts
