The mystery of the “Pacific Ocean Cold Tongue”
The Pacific “cold tongue”, an area of ocean that stretches West from Ecuador is cooler than expected. Courtesy of Harvepino/shutterstock via New Scientist
Below is an excerpt from a recently published article in New Scientist magazine:
“For years, climate models have predicted that as greenhouse gas emissions rise, ocean waters will warm. For the most part, they have been correct. Yet in a patch of the Pacific Ocean, the opposite is happening. Stretching west from the coast of Ecuador for thousands of kilometres lies a tentacle of water that has been cooling for the past 30 years. Why is this swathe of the eastern Pacific defying our predictions? Welcome to the mystery of the cold tongue.
This isn’t just an academic puzzle. Pedro DiNezio at the University of Colorado Boulder calls it ‘the most important unanswered question in climate science’. The trouble is that not knowing why this cooling is happening means we also don’t know when it will stop, or whether it will suddenly flip over into warming. This has global implications.”
“SOEST scientists are on the forefront of researching this critical question in climate science and related topics–for example, tropical Pacific climate change in general, El Niño, and Pacific decadal variability,” said Malte Stuecker, assistant professor in the SOEST Department of Oceanography and International Pacific Research Center, who was also featured for the New Scientist article. “For how long the cooling in the eastern Pacific persists and when exactly it will flip to warming will have big implications for regional climate predictions and adaptation efforts – including for Hawaiʻi.”
To make progress on the cold tongue mystery, Stuecker co-leads an international coordinated working group under the World Climate Research Programme called TROPICS.
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