Word: nino
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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...
Just to make things even more complicated, it now seems that some of the variations in El Nino cycles come from outside, imposed by other components of the world's intricately interconnected climate system. "We've been treating El Nino as a purely tropical problem, but what if it isn't?" asks Princeton University Oceanographer George Philander. What if some external force--a wind-driven current, say, that sweeps warm water down from the north--were to make it easier for the next El Nino to start...
External forces may also help explain why El Nino has a different impact on the weather from one cycle to the next. Recently, for example, Ed Cook of Lamont-Doherty and Julie Cole of the University of Colorado used tree rings from hundreds of sites to see how El Nino affected North America in the past. Before 1920, they found, El Nino appears to have affected a much larger region of the U.S. than it does today, channeling winter rain and snow all the way up into the Great Lakes and Great Plains. Afterward, however, its sphere of influence retreated...
...prime suspect is something known as the Pacific decadal oscillation. Since 1977, say researchers from the University of Washington, it has been locked into a mode that has made winters in the Pacific Northwest warm and dry, just as El Nino tends to do. But according to climatologist Nathan Mantua, the Pacific oscillation was in a different phase between 1947 and 1976, and as a result winters in Washington State were cold and rainy...
...another player in the El Nino drama is a cycle in the tropical Atlantic that involves a flip-flop between twin pools of water--one warm, one cool--that sit on opposite sides of the equator. Depending on the configuration, farmers in northeastern Brazil could either suffer greatly at the hands of El Nino or feel very little...