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Science 25 March 2005:
Vol. 307. no. 5717, p. 1835
DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5717.1835m
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This Week in Science
We are not sure how the frequency and severity of El Niño will be affected by future warming, but the geological record provides clues about how the system behaved in the past. Rickaby and Halloran (p. 1948) analyzed the Mg/Ca ratio of several species of planktonic foraminifera to reconstruct the position of the Pacific thermocline during the Pliocene between 5 and 2.7 million years ago, a time when climates were warm and CO2 levels were high. They find that the thermocline tilted more then than it does on average today, so more cold water upwelled in the eastern equatorial Pacific is observed during modern La Niñas. They conclude that this situation can best be explained by the persistence of a La Niña-like mean state in the Indo-Pacific basin. This result suggests that "hothouse" climates may not collapse onto a permanent El Niño-like state.
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)
