Word: nino
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These subsurface waves explain more than the origin and propagation of El Ninos. They also explain how El Ninos end. When the waves first hit the South American coast, some reflect back, like sound bouncing off a wall. When the reflected waves reach Asia, they rebound again. But this double bounce inverts their effect: instead of depressing the thermocline, these twice-reflected waves now lift it up. Cool water dilutes the warmer liquid at the surface, causing a temperature drop in the eastern Pacific known, aptly enough, as La Nina. Thus, observes Ants Leetmaa, director of the National Climate Prediction...
...Nina can bring its own set of weather headaches: a drier, hotter southern tier and a wetter, colder north. "Like a pendulum that goes back and forth, El Nino is one side of the extreme and La Nina is the other," says Scripps' Lisa Goddard. Although the magnitude of an El Nino doesn't necessarily determine the size of the subsequent La Nina, some climatologists are already saying that if you think this El Nino was bad, wait until you see his sister...
...long this boom-and-bust cycle has been operating, no one really knows. Finding out might seem to be a hopeless task, considering that the phenomenon was discovered only about a century ago by Peruvian fishermen. (It was they who called it El Nino, the Spanish name for the Christ child whose December birthday marks its peak.) But last fall, Columbia University oceanographer Richard Fairbanks was floating in the equatorial Pacific gathering data that could tell researchers about El Ninos going back thousands of years. Working aboard the research vessel Moana Wave, Fairbanks spent weeks at El Nino's very...
...water temperatures rise, these small creatures incorporate less strontium into their skeletons than they do under cooler conditions. Their oxygen content, meanwhile, records salinity swings, which in turn can be used to estimate rainfall. And warm temperatures and heavy rainfall--here, at least--are the telltale markers of El Nino...
Corals are not the only recorders of climate history. Jay Noller, for example, a geomorphologist from Vanderbilt University, has been studying ancient sediments from Peru's northern desert, which is among the dryest spots on earth--except during El Nino years. Then and only then, torrential rains from a succession of storms compact surface dust into a layer of fine, red soil. From the age of the soils he has examined so far, Noller concludes that the El Nino cycle has been operating for at least 2 million years, and probably much longer...