Global sea surface temperatures are pushing a building El Niño toward what scientists warn could be the strongest event on record for 2026 and 2027. A landmark study published Thursday in the journal Science analyzed modern and ancient corals in the Galápagos Islands to piece together a history of El Niño’s strength over the past 1,000 years. The findings reveal that over the past 40 years, these events became 40% stronger than they were during the pre-industrial era, providing some of the strongest evidence yet to suggest that climate change is amplifying El Niño.
Anchovies are an unlikely bellwether for a building climatic event, but their disappearance from the coast of South America is heralding one of the biggest El Ninos in living memory. These small fish usually live in colossal shoals along the Pacific coast of South America, feeding in the cold, nutrient-rich waters. Fishermen in Peru and Chile eagerly await the fishing season every year, but every now and then, it does not come as planned. Some years the easterly trade winds in the Pacific weaken or even reverse. The trigger for this remains uncertain, but it causes a warm ocean current to flow east to the coast of South America, replacing the nutrient-rich cold water and causing the anchovies to disappear. Because the warm waters arrive around Christmas time, Peruvian fishermen named the phenomenon El Nino de Navidad (The Christmas Child).
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the largest and most influential year-to-year climate variation on the planet. El Niño is the warm phase of this cycle, and it begins with a slowdown of east-to-west trade winds that usually pile up warm water in the western Pacific. This allows all that warm water to slosh eastward across the Pacific Basin and cause sea surface temperatures near the Americas—specifically in the central and eastern tropical Pacific—to sharply rise.
Coral Records Reveal Strengthening El Niños
El Nino: A phenomenon supercharged by climate change
For years, climate researchers debated whether global warming actively amplifies the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. While global temperature records show that El Niño compounds human-driven warming, helping ratchet up Earth’s temperature, whether the reverse is true has long remained an open question.
To investigate this, researchers utilized corals from what is arguably the best place to look, the Galápagos Islands in the eastern tropical Pacific. Julia Cole, a University of Michigan climate scientist and study co-author, noted that the region lies in the heart of where El Niño has some of its strongest impacts. Climate models had previously given mixed signals about whether El Niño events could become stronger with climate change, but physical evidence from fossilized corals in the western and central Pacific bolstered the argument, now reinforced by the new Galápagos findings. University of Arizona researcher Diane Thompson took a sample from an ancient coral, along with Andrea Lema, formerly at Charles Darwin Research Station.
We believe global warming is supercharging El Niño, and if that’s true, then we expect stronger climate extremes that will amplify ecological, infrastructural and human losses,
Julia Cole, professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan, said in a press release. No country has the resources to be fully protected from these impacts. This is one more reason we need to move away from fossil fuels, the root cause of the problem.
Climate scientist Kim Cobb, director of Brown University’s Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, who wasn’t involved with the study, stated that the new evidence is a critical piece of the puzzle
in understanding how rising global temperatures are altering this influential natural climate cycle.
Climate Change Is Supercharging El Niño, 1,000 Years of
Unprecedented Forecasts and Global Climate Consequences
As it develops in the Pacific, this year’s El Niño is combining with an ongoing, massive marine heatwave, further adding to the impacts of human-induced global warming. Its effects will be felt through food systems and biodiversity, impacting the livelihoods of fishermen and farmers, and the billions around the world reliant on the agricultural industry for their food.
El Niño’s development is being closely monitored from both space and sea, using satellites and a network of buoys. The devices in the Pacific Ocean continuously transmit data on ocean temperatures, currents and winds, helping scientists assess how powerful the event could become. Indications currently suggest the 2026-27 El Nino could be the strongest on record.
Research by the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather and climate service, shows that a typical El Nino episode leads to temperature rises of between 1 and 2 degrees Celsius in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. During an El Niño, trade winds slacken, and warm water slides eastward, leading to waters becoming generally one to two degrees Celsius above normal in the area around the Galápagos, while in a strong El Niño year they can reach more than two degrees C above normal, and this year’s event is predicted to hit three degrees above normal.
Climate change is supercharging El Niños, coral records show
The impact of El Nino, a natural weather pattern, spreads much further than South America, and can bring drought or floods to millions in affected areas. This year it comes supercharged by climate change, which is worrying many scientists, governments and aid workers.
Stephanie Roe, lead climate scientist with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), told Al Jazeera that this “super El Nino” is a stark reminder of how climate change can intensify pressures on both people and the natural world. “El Nino can bring devastating climate extremes on its own, but it’s unfolding today on a much warmer planet, increasing the likelihood that heat, drought, floods and fires will push communities and ecosystems beyond anything they have experienced before,” Roe said.
Economic Ripples Across Agriculture and Supply Chains
These shifts in ocean temperature change where heat is released into the atmosphere, which alters global wind patterns in ways that have huge effects around the world, such as leading to drought and wildfires in Indonesia and wetter weather across the southern U.S. It is those costly effects that make it so important to understand how El Niño is changing and if it will continue to do so in the future.
