A Section of the Pacific Ocean is Being Weird

Scientists are watching an area that's cooling rather than warming

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The Pacific Ocean is one of the last major enigmas remaining. Compared to the rest of planet Earth, we know very little about the Pacific Ocean. In some ways, it’s a bit like Space — both are inhospitable environments for us humans to survive. We haven’t even fully mapped the Pacific Ocean yet, although efforts are underway, nor do we know how deep it is. Plus, the creatures we’ve discovered in the depths of the Pacific are strange and alien-like.

Now, scientists have discovered yet another perplexing mystery within the Pacific. Experts spotted a distinct area that is cooling rather than warming like the rest of the ocean, especially over the last three decades, and experts don’t know why. The fact that it’s happening, however, has scientists on alert as they work to find out what, if any, effects it might have on global warming.

The Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is still a mystery, and there’s real urgency to learn as much as we can about it as quickly as we can because it covers more surface area than all land combined and already influences weather worldwide.

Climate models have long predicted that ocean temperatures will rise in response to rising greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, and for the most part, they’ve been spot on. NASA states:

[The global ocean] has absorbed 90% of the warming that has occurred in recent decades due to increasing greenhouse gases, and the top few meters of the ocean store as much heat as Earth's entire atmosphere.

Understanding how the ocean will respond to further rising global temperatures and greenhouse gases is of vital importance, if for no other reason than because the climate in the tropical Pacific influences weather around the world.

For instance, the temperatures of the Pacific Ocean naturally fluctuate by about three degrees every two to seven years. This cycle is known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation or ENSO. When the ocean is cooler than usual, it’s known as La Niña and becomes an El Niño when the ocean is warmer than usual. While three degrees doesn’t seem like a big deal, it’s enough to trigger a cascade of climate effects felt worldwide.

There’s also the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which mirrors the effects of ENSO, except experts aren’t sure what triggers it. A major reason is that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation occurs less frequently, typically between 20 and 30 years. So compared to ENSO, which switches every handful of years, the decades between the Pacific Decadal Oscillation transitions make long-term trends challenging to identify.

Now there’s another mystery involving the Pacific Ocean that scientists are eager to solve. It was first spotted in the 1990s but, like ENSO and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, experts at the time attributed it to the area’s natural climate variation cycles.

See, while the rest of the ocean is warming just as climate models predicted, there’s one patch of the Pacific that is doing precisely the opposite — it’s cooling and has been for a long, long time. But it’s increased over the last three decades.