NASA Just Detected the Next El Niño

[00:00:00]It was just spotted by [music] the NASA satellites while moving across the Pacific Ocean and it shouldn't be there.

[00:00:06]And the moment scientists confirmed what [music] it was, the World Meteorological Organization sounded the alarm. El Nino is coming back.

[00:00:16]And this time it looks different.

[00:00:19]Basically, it's a massive wave of warm water invisible [music] from the surface traveling toward the coast of South America. thermal surprises that can do a lot of harm to us. Right beneath the surface of the Pacific, temperatures in some places are hitting more than 6° C above normal. And that's not just a small fluctuation. This massive underwater reservoir of heat is fueling something that scientists are just beginning [music] to understand.

[00:00:47]Nowadays, it's not about if the El Nino will officially start. It's more about when. According to forecasts, it won't be a mild one. Some experts have actually started comparing it to the most catastrophic El Nino events ever recorded from 1877.

[00:01:03]What does it mean for us?

[00:01:06]UN Secretary General Antonio Gutirez claimed that El Nino will pour fuel on the fire of global warming that's already underway. We can expect a group of simultaneous disasters across different parts of the planet. We're talking here about extreme heat, severe droughts, and flooding across South America and part of Africa. Also, storms on the Pacific are expected to intensify. All of these coming from the same underwater wave of heat that NASA just tracked down moving across the Pacific. Scientists are taking a closer look at the depth of the reservoir, its speed, and the probability models. Every single indicator is pointing toward something big. The message from researchers right now is simple. Prepare now while there's still time to prepare.

[00:01:54]When El Nino fully develops this time, it'll affect not only the Pacific region, but also Australia, Africa, and Central and South America. The ocean is currently heating up. We should appreciate that NASA was able to spot it from space before anyone felt something on the ground. Let's take advantage of that and prepare properly.

[00:02:17]The next global disaster won't begin with a meteorite or a giant tsunami. The culprit might be warm ocean water. A powerful climate pattern called El Nino could develop in 2026 and it may become the strongest one in more than 100 years. In the past, a similar El Nino triggered droughts and a famine that wiped out up [music] to 60 million people. Now, El Nino is a climate pattern that starts in the Pacific Ocean. Huge areas of water near the equator become much warmer than normal.

[00:02:54]And we're not talking about a tiny patch of ocean. That warm water can spread for thousands of miles. When that happens, weather all over the planet goes crazy.

[00:03:05]Some places get massive floods, while others stop getting rain [music] completely. Winds shift, storms move, and seasons change. And [music] that's exactly what might have triggered the disaster in 1876.

[00:03:21]Massive drought spread across Asia, Africa, and South America. Rain disappeared for months, and [music] rivers dried up. Crops failed over enormous areas. Over the next 2 years, millions of people were slowly starving.

[00:03:37]Historians think that up to 3% of the world's population didn't survive this disaster. Even today, it remains one of the most [music] fatal catastrophes in human history. Scientists believe that the El Nino from the late 1870s may have been one of the strongest ever recorded.

[00:03:57]Now, how did they figure it out?

[00:03:59]Obviously, nobody [music] had satellites in the 1800s. There were no weather apps or climate models or modern instruments.

[00:04:07]So researchers had to investigate the past almost like detectives. [music] And one of the biggest clues came from trees. You see, every year a tree grows a new ring inside its trunk. In wet years, [music] the rings grow thicker because the tree gets more water and grows better. During droughts, the rings become thin and weak. So trees basically store weather records inside [music] themselves. Scientists studied giant drought atlases built from tree rings gathered from all over the world with some of those records going back hundreds of years and they showed something alarming. [music] Apparently during the famine years huge parts of the planet experienced extreme drought at the same time. Then researchers checked old rainfall records from thousands of weather stations worldwide.

[00:05:01]Finally, they compared them with ocean temperature records gathered by sailors in the 1800s. [music] All the evidence pointed to the same thing. The Pacific Ocean likely seriously warmed up during those years.

[00:05:16]And that's exactly what happens during an El Nino. But that one may have been way more extreme than normal. [music] The event likely lasted around 16 to 18 months, several months longer than many other El Nino events in recorded history. That extra time matters a lot because the longer the Pacific Ocean stays unusually warm, [music] the longer weather systems around the world remain broken. Some regions experienced droughts [music] for several seasons in a row. Rainfall dropped to record lows in several parts [music] of the planet. It hit Asia especially hard.

[00:05:56]Scientists [music] found that parts of Asia went through the worst drought in about 800 years. Crops failed across huge regions instead of only one country or one farming zone. The thing is a drought alone does not automatically lead to mass starvation. But when huge crop failures [music] happen at the same time as food shortages and bad transportation, millions of people can suddenly end up with no food reaching them. And that's exactly what happened during the global famine. Anyway, [music] El Nino could explain why weather patterns broke down across multiple continents at once. Even though modern technology makes us far [music] more advanced than people from the 1870s, we still depend on stable weather for food, farming, water, and electricity. [music] And El Nino has the power to disrupt our planet on a gigantic scale. The most [music] unsettling part is that the past disaster was not caused by some single [music] freak event. Researchers believe that those conditions develop naturally and Earth's [music] climate system is very capable of producing something this extreme again. Today, the world is much hotter than it was in the 1870s. So, if another super El Nino appeared in the future, could droughts become even more severe? An El Nino can mess with the weather almost everywhere on Earth at the same time. One of the [music] first big changes often happens during hurricane season. Normally, the Atlantic Ocean produces many tropical storms and hurricanes. But a strong El Nino can [music] create powerful winds high in the atmosphere. Those winds basically tear storms [music] apart before they can fully grow. So places like the Caribbean and parts of the Atlantic sometimes [music] see fewer hurricanes during strong El Nino years. But in the Pacific, it's the opposite story. Storm activity often ramps up in the central [music] and eastern parts of the ocean.

[00:08:04]That can bring trouble for places like Hawaii and sometimes even the southwest US. If storms move in that direction, [music] then winter hits and this is when El Nino starts shaking [music] things up in North America. The northern US, western Canada, and Alaska usually turn warmer than normal, and some areas get less snow. But it doesn't mean these regions don't have winter. Cold [music] snaps can still show up out of nowhere. At the same time, the southern US often gets wetter. A stronger jetream, [music] which is basically fast wind high in the sky at around 30 to 45,000 ft, pushes more storms across the south. They bring heavy rain, flooding, and cold weather to regions that are usually much drier.

[00:08:54]Other parts of the world can get hit even harder. [music] For example, India and parts of Southeast Asia often lose important summer monsoon rains during El Nino years. And those rains are critical because hundreds of millions of people depend on them for farming and water supplies. The monsoon weakens. Drought spreads fast. The Caribbean also gets much drier than normal during a strong El Nino. In some areas, there are even water shortages and crop damage. In Southeast Africa, drought conditions can become dangerous during the southern hemisphere summer, especially from December to February. A powerful El Nino may already be building in the Pacific Ocean right now. And some researchers think it could become one of the strongest ever recorded. Ocean temperatures in part of the Pacific are heating up fast. In some places, the water might become more than 5° F hotter than normal. But for the [music] planet's climate system, this difference is massive. The danger is actually even bigger than it looks. Today we have better technology, satellites, forecasting, [music] global communication, but our society still has weak spots. Food supply chains are actually under pressure, and many regions are also [music] dealing with drought. Ocean temperatures have been breaking records for years. Some farming areas are becoming less stable because of the weather changes. Extreme weather events are becoming more spread out every year.

[00:10:35]A strong El Nino could pour gasoline on all of that. Scientists are especially worried about how unpredictable the weather could become over the next year.

[00:10:46]Oh, by the way, El Nino is just part of a big cycle. Normally, winds near the surface of the Pacific Ocean, called trade winds, blow from east to west.

[00:10:57]They push warm, sun-heated water toward Asia. At the same [music] time, colder water rises up from deep below near North and South America. This is the reason why the ocean surface ends up uneven. The water near Indonesia can be about 1 and 1/2 ft higher than near Ecuador. But sometimes those winds weaken. When that happens, the warm water starts sliding back toward the [music] east. The eastern Pacific heats up and the western side cools down.

[00:11:29]That's an El Nino. If the opposite happens and the trade [music] winds get stronger, even more cold water rises from the deep ocean. As a result, the Pacific cools down more than usual. That phase is called Elan Na. [music] El Nino and Lan Na are basically two sides of the same system. Together, they're part [music] of a cycle called Enzo. Usually an El Nino lasts about 9 to 12 months, [music] while lenia can stick around for 1 to 3 years. But not all El Nino are the same. The classic type is called an eastern [music] Pacific El Nino. That's the one where the eastern side of the Pacific warms up the most. But there's another kind called a central Pacific El Nino. In this case, the warmer water sits more in the middle of the ocean.

[00:12:24]Well, if it seems like things on Earth aren't already strange, our home planet just got [music] a little stranger.

[00:12:32]There's a hidden cemetery that nobody knew about. Now, scientists are trying to figure out why this cemetery exists.

[00:12:41]And the strangest part, the answer [music] may involve one of the most powerful and disastrous climate systems on Earth, El Nino.

[00:12:50]There's this curious thing about Earth.

[00:12:52]If you split it into the northern and southern hemispheres, you'll see that they reflect almost the same amount of sunlight back into space, [music] but they look completely different.

[00:13:03]There's more land up north and more ocean down south. There are different clouds, different weather, [music] and still the energy balance is almost equal. The clever term for this phenomenon is hemispheric albido symmetry. It's a bit of a mystery for us, but the reason might be simple.

[00:13:25]The southern hemisphere has more clouds that bounce sunlight [music] back.

[00:13:30]At the same time, the north has more land and pollution particles that also reflect light. It somehow evens out.

[00:13:39]But then things get more interesting. A group of scientists started questioning, what if this balance isn't only north south? What if Earth is also balanced in a different direction? They dug into satellite data and found something surprising. There seems to be an east west balance, too. It's not a perfect line you can draw on a map, of course, [music] but statistically it shows up.

[00:14:05]If you split Earth along the 27° east and [music] 153° west meridians, you'll get two halves that reflect almost the same amount of sunlight. That line cuts through Europe, Africa, Turkey [music] on one side, and there's Alaska, and a big part of the ocean on the other.

[00:14:24]Admittedly, [music] these are very different places, but the numbers match.

[00:14:29]To figure it all out, researchers use 25 years of data from NASA's series satellites from 2001 to 2025.

[00:14:39]These satellites track how much sunlight Earth gets and how much it sends back into space.

[00:14:46]If the numbers are steady, the planet's temperature is stable. But if they change, the weather starts warming or cooling.

[00:14:54]The research team broke everything down.

[00:14:56]Oceans with no ice, with ice, land, cloudy skies, clear skies, every piece of the system, and then they tested different ways of slicing the planet to see if any pattern stayed stable. Well, one of them did. That 27 degree east line kept showing a bizarre kind of balance. Both sides ended up with almost the same mix of ocean and land and a similar volume of clouds. They even had similar amounts of sunlight reflected from clear skies.

[00:15:28]At first, the researchers were skeptical. After all, Earth is a sphere, and if you slice it in enough different ways, you can sometimes find patterns that don't really mean anything.

[00:15:39]But when they started testing this pattern more, it didn't disappear. Even better, it showed a triple symmetry.

[00:15:47]First, this is the only east-west line that creates this balance. Second, it doesn't drift. It stays basically locked at 27° east all the way from 2001 to today. And third, both halves of the planet end up with almost identical amounts of land and ocean. But then the question is what's actually causing this symmetry? Right now everything points to Enzo, the El Nino Southern Oscillation.

[00:16:15]It's basically a massive cycle [music] where the Pacific Ocean shifts between warm and cool phases. Enzo shows [music] up every 2 to 7 years. And it keeps flipping between three states, El Nino, Lan Na, and a neutral phase.

[00:16:33]El Nino is the warm phase. The trade winds, permanent [music] winds that blow from east to west at the equator, get weaker or sometimes even reverse. That allows warm water to pile up in the central and east Pacific.

[00:16:48]Meanwhile, cold, deep water near South America stops coming up. [music] This pattern affects the whole world.

[00:16:55]There is more rain in parts of the Americas, but the weather gets extremely dry in places like Australia and parts of Asia.

[00:17:04]Leninia is the opposite. The trade winds get stronger than usual and shove warm water towards Asia. As a result, more cold, nutrient-rich [music] water ends up in the eastern Pacific. So, the weather usually gets wetter in Australia and Indonesia and drier in parts of the southern US.

[00:17:23]And then there's also the neutral phase when nothing exciting is happening and ocean temperatures are closer to normal.

[00:17:30]There's another curious fact. The name of this weather pattern also splits the system in two. El Nino Leninia is the ocean part that's linked to temperature changes in the Pacific.

[00:17:42]But southern oscillation is the air part, meaning changes in [music] air pressure between the western Pacific near Australia and the eastern Pacific near Tahiti. And because the Pacific is massive, this one system ends up influencing the entire world's weather. rainfalls, floods, droughts, heat patterns, even hurricanes.

[00:18:04]Now, let's get back to that symmetry idea. The researchers noticed that the tiny year-to-year shifts in [music] that east west balance seem to line up with Enzo changes, and they couldn't explain it without something [music] called the Walker circulation.

[00:18:19]It's basically a huge loop of rising and sinking air over the Pacific, which connects cloud systems all over the tropics.

[00:18:28]It's like a giant conveyor belt moving heat and moisture around the planet.

[00:18:33]That circulation changes where clouds form and how much sunlight gets reflected back into space.

[00:18:40]So during Leninia, the eastern hemisphere reflects a bit more sunlight.

[00:18:45]During El Nino, [music] the western hemisphere takes over. The system keeps flipping back and forth and over time it kind of anchors that symmetry line near 27° east.

[00:18:58]Now, this means Earth's climate isn't a set of separate systems. It's all connected. And here's why we should care. We already know that Earth's albido symmetry controls how much solar energy gets reflected back [music] into space.

[00:19:13]Right now, it's about 29%.

[00:19:16]And even small changes in that number matter a lot for global warming.

[00:19:21]The problem is many climate models still [music] don't reproduce this east west symmetry correctly and we need to change that because if a model misses this pattern, it might also miss [music] something even more important.

[00:19:35]And that's where things get a little worrying. The same climate system that helps maintain this balance is also responsible for El Nino and Lan Ninia.

[00:19:45]And some researchers think the next El Nino could become the strongest in more than 100 years. It might hit already in 2026.

[00:19:55]Back in the past, a similar El Nino triggered droughts and a famine that wiped out up to 60 million people.

[00:20:03]In 1876, massive droughts spread across Asia, Africa, and South America. Rain disappeared [music] for months and rivers dried up. Crops failed over enormous areas. Over the next 2 years, millions of people were slowly starving.

[00:20:20]Historians think that up to 3% of the world's population didn't [music] survive that disaster. Even today, it remains one of the most fatal catastrophes [music] in human history.

[00:20:33]Now, even though modern technology makes us far more advanced than people [music] from the 1870s, we still depend on stable weather for food, farming, water, and electricity.

[00:20:44]And El Nino has the [music] power to disrupt our planet on a gigantic scale.

[00:20:49]The most unsettling part is that the past disaster was not caused by some single freak event. Researchers believe that those conditions develop naturally and Earth's climate system can easily produce something this extreme again.

[00:21:04]Today, the world is much hotter than it was in the 1870s.

[00:21:08]So, if another super El Nino appeared in the future, droughts could become even more severe.

[00:21:16]A powerful El Nino may already be building in the Pacific Ocean right now, and some researchers think it could become one of the strongest ever recorded. Ocean temperatures in part of the Pacific are heating up fast. In some places, the water might become more than 5° hotter than normal. For the planet's [music] climate system, this difference is massive.

[00:21:40]The danger is actually even bigger than it looks. Today we have satellites forecasting [music] global communication, but there are still weak spots. Food supply chains are actually under pressure and many regions are already dealing with drought.

[00:21:56]Ocean temperatures have been breaking records for years. Some farming areas are becoming less stable because of weather changes.

[00:22:04]Extreme weather events are becoming more spread out every year. And a strong El Nino could pour gasoline on all of that.

[00:22:14]That's it for today. So, hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends. Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the bright