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Many scientists believe there is a common thread in this crazy-quilt weather, some fair, some foul, some just puzzling. It is a phenomenon known in Spanish as El Niño, a reference to the Christ child. Named by the fishermen of Peru and Ecuador, El Niño is a warm current of equatorial water that usually appears around Christmas off western South America. The peculiar ocean movement sharply reduces the fish catch, especially anchovies, which are ground up and sold as meal for livestock and poultry. The present El Niño, which first appeared last June...
...from the sea bottom. The result is economic disaster. The anchovies are largely gone. Coastal waters have turned into a sludge of rotting plankton and fish. Sea birds, whose droppings (guano) are an important source of fertilizer, are dying off for lack of food. When the last severe El Niño struck in 1972, the reduced catch of the cheap anchovies raised poultry prices in the U.S. by more than...
...scientists study El Niño, they are finding that it is really a much broader disturbance of ocean currents and winds that ranges far across the Pacific and even beyond. One aspect of this larger phenomenon is an event weather scientists call the southern oscillation, a flip-flop-like reversal of atmospheric pressures at opposite sides of the great ocean. At this time of year, a great, spongy mass of warm, wet air ordinarily hangs over Australia and Indonesia, while the eastern side of the Pacific is covered with relatively dry, cool air. Not so in 1983. A high...
...major effects is a reduction of the trade winds that sweep the Pacific's warm equatorial waters westward. As a result, some of the water flows south toward the South American coast, rising over and blocking the cold Humboldt waters from the Antarctic. This is how El Niño is born. But the oscillation also appears to tweak the Northern Hemisphere's weather as well. This year the increased west-to-east jet stream, which usually diminishes during winter, has raised sea levels 8 in. above normal and brought huge amounts of precipitation to California. While these...
...ni, ichi',"went the countdown last week, "four, three, two, one." At "zero," Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone aimed a glove-covered finger at a button in his Tokyo residence. The prime-ministerial pressure detonated a dynamite charge 440 miles north of Tokyo and 780 ft. beneath the Tsugaru Strait, which separates Honshu and Hokkaido islands. The blast blew away the final rock separating two pilot tunnels under the strait that have been boring toward each other for the past 18 years...