Word: oceaneering
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This eastward flow is central to the physics that drive El Nino, says Scripps' Nicholas Graham. The sloshing sends waves across the ocean like ripples in a pond. These waves, in turn, push down on the so-called thermocline, a layer of cooler water that normally mingles with the warmer water at the surface. As the thermocline sinks to greater depths, the mixing stops, temperatures at the sea's surface rise, and an El Nino begins...
...warm water created by the south-moving ripples created a heat wave that sent residents of Santiago flocking to nearby beaches in the middle of winter, while the north-moving waves triggered a sharp rise in ocean temperatures off California and Washington State, delighting sportfishermen by attracting tropical species like marlin to usually frigid waters...
...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 epicenter, a patch of ocean near Christmas Island. Using a powerful oil drill, he and his colleagues repeatedly bored into ancient reef beds buried beneath the sea floor, pulling up chunks of coral as white as sun-bleached bone...
...then there's the North Atlantic oscillation, which makes El Nino's effect on the eastern U.S. as unpredictable as its influence over Brazil. This climate system, says Gerry Bell of the Climate Prediction Center, changes the position of the jet stream over the ocean. Until recently, the North Atlantic oscillation, which strongly influences Europe's weather as well, was considered to be primarily a manifestation of the atmosphere. But researcher Michael McCartney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution thinks it too is heavily influenced by the sea--in this case by an ocean gyre, a surface current that follows...
Each of these phenomena can boost or curb the effects of El Nino. But do they influence each other at a deeper level? Does El Nino trigger any of these other cycles? Is it triggered by them? To find out, Fairbanks turned to the Indian Ocean, where sea-surface temperatures, it turns out, rise and fall in response to both the monsoonal cycle and the El Nino cycle...