Galapagos corals suggest climate change drives stronger El Niños

 

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 

Sea Cucumber Help to Protect the Coral Reefs

Image courtesy of Leonard Low, CC BY 2.0.



Joel Kontinen

A sea cucumber looks a bit like a cucumber.it is an invertebrate, living on the seafloor. there are 1,250 of them. they measure some 1.9 centimetres or three-quarters of an inch to 1.8 metres or 6 feet long.

They have “ five rows of tiny feet that run lengthwise down their bodies, from mouth to anus.” and can live on “pieces of algae and marine creatures”.

They can digest sand and , “sea cucumbers excrete byproducts that benefit ocean ecosystems, particularly coral reefs,” and as their products a relatively high (or basic) pH, which means the water surrounding sea cucumber habitats is somewhat protected from ocean acidification. Sea cucumbers also excrete calcium carbonate, which is a primary ingredient in coral formation, and ammonia, which acts as a fertilizer and promotes coral growth.”

So, we see that God has created the animals to care for nature.

Source:

Ross, Rachel. 2019. What Is a Sea Cucumber? Live Science. (16 October).