Buried in the calcium skeletons of ancient corals near the Galápagos Islands, scientists have found what satellite data alone could never tell us: that El Niño, the great Pacific oscillation reshaping weather across continents, has grown measurably fiercer since the industrial age began. A team led by paleoclimatologist Julia Cole reconstructed a thousand years of ocean temperature from coral chemistry, finding that the powerful El Niños of recent decades are not a natural fluctuation but a departure from the long human past. The discovery arrives as ocean temperatures off South America alread
Corals reveal El Niño events are intensifying beyond natural cycles
Intensifying El Niño events cause flooding in Ecuador and Peru, droughts and wildfires in Australia and Indonesia, and mass coral bleaching threatening marine ecosystems and food security.