As its full name suggests, El Nino – Southern Oscillation It is a phenomenon that appears in the Southern Hemisphere, specifically in the Pacific Ocean. It is an irregular cycle, which returns at intervals ranging between two and seven years, and the prediction of its “return” is still uncertain. It is also a cycle that has serious consequences for the global climate. It starts with warmer Pacific waters, which, in a domino effect, leads to disruptions elsewhere: extreme heatwaves and drought in some areas, rainfall and floods in others.
Last year, the addition of human-caused global warming and the impact of El Niño meant that temperature records were broken month after month on a continental or global scale.
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However, reconstructing climates that existed about 21,000 years ago based on the chemistry of shells, Leads researchers to the conclusion Global warming will help strengthen El Niño, or at least make stronger El Niño more frequent. Thus increasing the frequency of extreme weather events around the world.
They chose this period because it is the last peak of the ice age (or glacial maximum). This period gave them an opportunity to try to see if the changes in annual temperatures that we would expect when comparing years 'with' and 'without' El Niño, could be confirmed by analyzing differences in shellfish thickness – since these are very sensitive to changes in temperature.
The two phenomena do not appear to be merely relatedBut warmer years tend to confirm the presence of the feedback curve. Feedback loop): The higher the average temperature, the thinner and warmer the water layer is at the surface. This makes it easier to be “transported” by prevailing winds to the east, creating the El Niño phenomenon.
Venturing a little further in their predictions, these researchers in geophysics and atmospheric sciences from five US universities wrote that in the “average” scenario of increase in global greenhouse gases favored by climate scientists, an “extreme El Niño” would now occur once every decade. Time. Instead of once every two decades, as was the case over the past century.
