Thursday August 29, 2024
Live Science —
For a few months this summer, a large strip of Atlantic Ocean along the equator cooled at record speed. Though the cold patch is now warming its way back to normal, scientists are still baffled by what caused the dramatic cooling in the first place.
The anomalous cold patch, which is confined to a stretch of ocean spanning several degrees north and south of the equator, formed in early June following a monthslong streak of the warmest surface waters in more than 40 years. While that region is known to swing between cold and warm phases every few years, the rate at which it plunged from record high to low this time is “really unprecedented,” Franz Tuchen, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Miami in Florida who is tracking the event, told Live Science.
“We are still scratching our heads as to what’s actually happening,” Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who oversees an array of buoys in the tropics that have been gathering real-time data of the cold patch, told Live Science. “It could be some transient feature that has developed from processes that we don’t quite understand.”