An Annual Blast of Pacific Cold Water Did Not Occur

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

mitchbob

155 points

46 comments

nytimes.comResearchstory

calmmixed

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Climate ChangeOceanographyPacific Upwelling

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Climate Change

Oceanography

Pacific Upwelling

The annual upwelling of cold Pacific water off Panama did not occur in 2025, sparking discussion about the implications for climate models and the significance of this event.

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01Story posted
Sep 13, 2025 at 9:54 AM EDT
4 months ago
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Sep 14, 2025 at 1:34 PM EDT
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Discussion (46 comments)

Showing 39 comments of 46

dvrj101

4 months ago

1 reply

https://www.earth.com/news/unprecedented-collapse-panamas-oc...

dvrj101

4 months ago

2 replies

The ocean generates 50 percent of the oxygen we need, absorbs 30 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions and captures 90 percent of the excess heat generated by these emissions.

echelon

4 months ago

3 replies

Are there any clathrate-gun [1] style hypothesis that predict the entire gas exchange system could fall into runaway collapse? I'd love to read up on them, if so.

Slow changes, a return to a Cretaceous-style climate, etc. are a very different story than an "overnight" exponential and unstoppable Venusification of the planet.

Slowly rising sea levels in Miami vs one day you wake up and can't breathe anymore. Very different situations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

jbay808

4 months ago

1 reply

This one still keeps me up at night, especially the figure on the 6th page.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180513182952/http://burro.case...

The short summary of this hypothesis is that the ocean develops hypoxic zones, anaerobic bacteria boom, and eventually the ocean starts releasing masses of poisonous H2S gas that wipes out most life on land (and strips the ozone layer for good measure).

They speculate that this might have been a mechanism behind the "great dying" at the end of the Permian. I'm sure the thinking has advanced in the last 20 years, but whenever people ask what the worst-case scenario for global warming could be, my mind drifts back to this.

azeirah

4 months ago

1 reply

Your url doesn't work, I can't read the article

jbay808

4 months ago

Thanks, it should be fixed now!

DoctorOetker

4 months ago

If you have ice and water in local thermal equilibrium, then you cant suddenly raise the temperature or decrease it: to increase or decrease the temperature one must add or remove heat. At a phase transition the temperature doesn't change when adding or removing heat, but part of the ice will melt or part of the water will freeze. So phase changes are temperature buffers, and can buffer an amount of heat.

As the arctic ice will disappear we will not just loose a few shiny white objects, but we will loose a heat buffer, to the tune of 334 kJ/kg ... times 18 000 cubic kilometers. That is 6 x 10 ^ 21 Joules.

Check this graph (note the zero is absolute):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_of_sea_ice#/media/...

We are going to witness the loss of a huge thermal buffer in a few decades at most.

pixl97

4 months ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event

>An anoxic event describes a period wherein large expanses of Earth's oceans were depleted of dissolved oxygen (O2), creating toxic, euxinic (anoxic and sulfidic) waters.[1] Although anoxic events have not happened for millions of years, the geologic record shows that they happened many times in the past. Anoxic events coincided with several mass extinctions and may have contributed to them.[2] These mass extinctions include some that geobiologists use as time markers in biostratigraphic dating

jijijijij

4 months ago

The ocean's ecosystems also significantly provide the land with nutrients by e.g. salmon runs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_run

ashtakeaway

4 months ago

2 replies

Somehow I get the feeling if they used the word 'mass' instead of 'blob', a lot more readers would take the subject seriously.

tokai

4 months ago

1 reply

Its a common word used for large areas of ocean water of anomalous temperature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob_(Pacific_Ocean)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_blob

Blob is perfectly good word, and much more precise in this case than 'mass'.

thimkerbell

4 months ago

Depends on the audience maybe.

yieldcrv

4 months ago

2 replies

How are readers not taking it seriously, and what would be different if they did

The people tasked with knowing why it happens dont know why it happens

tobyjsullivan

4 months ago

To your second point, the average reader is not a scientist (wrt this topic, at least). Scientists equate proving with knowing. To the average reader, however, there is little correlation between what we know and what we’ve proved.

The scientists don’t know why it happened, because they haven’t proved why it happened.

I’d wager that the average reader knows perfectly well why it happened.

pstuart

4 months ago

Because the subject has been artfully politicized to an audience that will reject anything they are told to reject.

Fossil fuel barons are funding this so they can lord it over us up to the end and then they retreat to their bunkers. It would make for a great thriller of a movie but it's a shit timeline to actually live through.

parineum

4 months ago

5 replies

> The record he helps maintain shows the upwelling has taken place annually for at least 40 years...

40 data points isn't a lot.

baq

4 months ago

1 reply

sometimes it's more than enough

jibe

4 months ago

But then sometimes it’s not?

convolvatron

4 months ago

1 reply

author Mulkey responds to a similar question in the comments:

Aaron O'Dea, told me in an email that the upwelling has been "as predictable as clockwork" for at least 40 years of detailed data used in the study. They have less detailed data showing that it goes back at least 80 years. And while this doesn't mean it never vanished before, he said they can trace the the upwelling's impact on coastal ecology and humans for 11,000 years.

parineum

4 months ago

That's not really a retort, unless the question in the comments is different than my comment.

11,000 years of data doesn't give you any meaningful data unless you can show that this _never_ happened in the past. 40 years is the amount of data for that.

There's no good evidence to suggest that 1/40 of it not happening is an abberation. It could be 1/100 of those 11,000 years this happened and there'd be no way to know.

If it continues to happen, we'll have something. For now nobody should be "alarmed".

throwawayqqq11

4 months ago

1 reply

40 records as in "observation" is expectable.

But dont dismis climate science that easily.

> An increasingly popular method to deduce historic sea surface temperatures uses sediment-entombed bodies of marine archaea

https://www.ocean.washington.edu/story/Ancient_Ocean_Tempera...

parineum

4 months ago

> But dont dismis climate science that easily.

When did I do that?

This could easily be a 99% phenomenon and it's easily possible to not have seen this happen. If it happens next year, I'll be concerned, if it happens the following year, I'll be alarmed.

darth_avocado

4 months ago

1 reply

It’s not 40 data points, it’s 40 years of observations. Something that suggests that a phenomenon has consistently happened for 40 years and it didn’t this year. I think it merits investigation, especially when you have established with other data points that the phenomenon is consequential.

parineum

4 months ago

40 years of data for something that happens once a year is how many events?

4 months ago

Think about it this way, to be able to say that it takes place annually instead of i.e. biannually or monthly, you need a lot more than one sample per year. You need enough samples to know when it is or isn't occurring.

https://www.earth.com/news/unprecedented-collapse-panamas-oc... mentions a lot of date oriented measurements which suggest they probably have at least 52 samples per year, if not daily samples:

> The 40-year record makes the 2025 failure stand out. Average historical onset around January 20 contrasts with a March 4 threshold crossing in 2025.

> The cool season shrank from roughly nine weeks to less than two weeks. Minimum sea surface temperature (SST) rose from historical lows near 66.2°F to about 73.9°F.

chris_va

4 months ago

3 replies

For those technically inclined, look up Ekman transport. And if you rabbit hole far enough, you'll encounter one of the most awe inspiring units of measurement, the Sverdrup.

As an aside, Panama is a particularly sensitive point in climate models I've run.

(Disclosure that I manage a climate research group)

fragmede

4 months ago

2 replies

How much more accurate a simulation could you run if you had OpenAI's training budget and supercomputer? (≈$100M)

looping__lui

4 months ago

1 reply

As a fan of a sport that greatly relies on accurate weather forecasts with an interest in weather models my impression is that more supercomputer budget isn’t necessarily the issue (eg., more granular models can be less accurate) but the lack of data on the initial state is… Things like snow on mountains, soil conditions, vegetation, soil humidity and simply the problem of just having relatively few data-points makes stuff tricky… That stuff changes with season. I have seen some magic improvements coming from small shop companies tweaking the models here and there a bit - massively impressed. Now, running these simulations even further into the future - I have my doubt much useful prediction is gonna come out.

alwa

4 months ago

1 reply

To your knowledge is there anybody working on a “littering the globe with huge quantity of cheap self-contained sensors” kind of project? Or is that the kind of work best done from the air or from orbit?

looping__lui

4 months ago

I am no authority to speak about this - but I believe expanding sensors and improving on data gathering is a continuous and on-going effort (e.g., weather station on ships, airplanes, stations deployed on sea etc.). Better weather satellites are also a thing. But then there is just so much more that could be done and all these data-points are still unevenly distributed (e.g., planes and ships follow routes). Weather models are improving quite a bit “behind the scenes” but again - I think we are far away from getting anything reliable for several days into the future; not to speak months or years.

Here is a nice interview highlighting a couple of improvements people are driving for a niche sport weather forecast: https://magazine.weglide.org/skysight-interview-matthew-scut...

jjtheblunt

4 months ago

what would you do with a more accurate simulation's data, besides have burned a great amount of money and (earth warming?) power to compute it?

pstuart

4 months ago

Does the group have anything online for the morbidly curious?

metalman

4 months ago

Self taught climate junky here, so the Ekman Transport thing is a gem, which explains things I have seen inreal time watching huricanes leave there fingerprint right on the oceans surface

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/index.h...

and will be watching for the Panama upwelling more carefully, but my eye has been drawn to the intersectiin of the labrador current and the gulf stream this year, which looks off a bit with the labrador erratic and the gulf stream tending a bit south. Also surface currents are exceptionaly visible in the artic sea ice, right now

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today

bikenaga

4 months ago

1 reply

Original PNAS article: "Unprecedented suppression of Panama’s Pacific upwelling in 2025" - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2512056122

everybodyknows

4 months ago

Thanks -- answers the correlation question provoked in any climate dilettante like me:

> Upwelling began significantly earlier during El Niño versus La Niña, but duration and minimum temperature did not differ significantly between El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) states ...

shawkinaw

4 months ago

Reading about the Azores high, Hadley cells, etc. on Wikipedia is incredibly illuminating. Hadley cells and related phenomena combined with the Coriolis effect explain a bunch of weather phenomena: trade winds and westerlies, the jet stream, hurricane formation, global rainfall patterns.

mitchbobAuthor

4 months ago

https://archive.ph/fccxa

someonehere

4 months ago

The YT channel Space Weather News covered this and the cause. Worth knowing what’s really going on with our universe.

natebc

4 months ago

gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/climate/pacific-cold-wate...

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ID: 45232100Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 3:22:58 PM