EL NIÑO HAS HEALTH, ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE CONSEQUENCES
WASHINGTON, DC, September 8, 2000 (ENS) - Three new studies
released this month link El Niño cycles in the Pacific Ocean to
major human health, environmental and global climate
consequences. Ecologists at Cornell University and three other
universities announced today in the journal "Science" that El
Niño cycles are linked to cholera outbreaks in South America and
Asia. Cholera is caused by a bacterium that lives among
zooplankton in brackish waters and in estuaries where rivers meet
the sea, and infects humans through contaminated water. The
scientists found an 11 month lag between El Niños and major
cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh, India over an eight year span.
Public health authorities will now have an 11 month warning,
beginning with the start of an El Niño. But Stephen Ellner,
professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell, said,
"this model will be more useful when somebody figures out how to
predict El Niño."
In the September 15 issue of "Geophysical Research Letters,"
researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the
University of California - San Diego, show that warm, nutrient
depleted waters ushered in during the 1997-1998 El Niño resulted
in a reduction in phytoplankton - the plants that are the base of
the marine ecosystem. "When El Niño suppresses the availability
of nutrients in the sunlit surface waters, the abundance of
phytoplankton declines," said Greg Mitchell, research biologist
in the Marine Research Division at Scripps. "Phytoplankton
communities are the primary producers for the ocean, comparable
to grasslands for terrestrial systems. Success of fish population
recruitment, and therefore commercial fisheries, may in part
depend on interannual cycles of nutrient and phytoplankton
distributions associated with El Niño and La Niña."
In today’s issue of the journal "Science," paleoclimatologist
David Lea, associate professor of geological sciences at the
University of California - Santa Barbara reveals that the fossil
record shows that changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean lead
climate change around the globe. "If we can understand the
mechanism of climate change then we can see how global warming
will play out," said Lea. Just like El Nino and La Nina cause
short term world wide climate changes emanating from the waters
of the Pacific warm pool, it appears that the tropical Pacific
may be the driver of the changes that have lead to past ice ages,
he said. Tropical oceans "act as a global heat engine," said Lea,
and may be "a major driving force in the waxing and waning of
continental ice sheets."
* * *
SOURCE: Environment News Service (ENS)
****************************************************************
To post a submission by email at climate-newswire@sidsnet.org
To unsubscribe, email to majordomo@sidsnet.org with the message:
unsubscribe climate-newswire
To receive updates via email, send an email to majordomo@sidsnet.org with the message:
subscribe climate-newswire
No SUBJECTS required either case.
Brought to you on the SMALL Island Developing States Network: http://www.sidsnet.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Sep 11 2000 - 17:06:49 EDT