The Coral Chronicles

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https://www.science.org/content/article/remote-pacific-island-clues-el-ninos-future-preserved-ancient-reefs

By PAUL VOOSEN, Science. 

Excerpt: ...The El Niño event, now at its peak, is driving weather extremes not just in Vanuatu, but all over the planet. Drought has struck Australia, as well as the Amazon, where intolerably hot waters have suffocated endangered pink dolphins. Rains have drenched Peru, spreading dengue, while warm waters intruding near its coast have disrupted the world’s largest anchovy fishery and forced the nation to cancel a lucrative fishing season. Those same warm waters accelerated Hurricane Otis, which devastated Acapulco and Mexico’s Pacific coast in October 2023. The effects have been truly global: By suppressing the Pacific’s ability to absorb heat from the atmosphere, El Niño helped make 2023 the hottest year in history by a huge margin. ...TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO, at the peak of the last ice age, Earth was 6°C cooler than today. Glaciers buried the northern continents. But in the tropical Pacific, things wouldn’t have looked so different, with one exception: Every island would have been much, much taller. With the planet’s water locked up in ice sheets, sea levels were 120 meters lower. .Corals continued to grow around these towering islands, capturing the swings of El Niño and La Niña events as chemical signals within their skeletons much like tree rings. Later, when the ice sheets melted, the reefs at Vanuatu and elsewhere were submerged, putting their ancient records of El Niño and La Niña out of reach. ...Ancient corals can capture the climatic effects of El Niño and La Niña events that occurred thousands of years ago. But most reefs from the last ice age are submerged by more than 100 meters of water. On the island of Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu, however, tectonic forces have lifted ancient corals back to the surface.... 

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