Galápagos corals show El Niño events are more extreme now than in past 1,000 years – here’s how my team made the discovery

A NOAA scientist takes a coral sample in the Galapagos Islands. The process does not injure the colony, which grows back. Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory - NOAA

Temperatures have warmed dramatically across the equatorial Pacific Ocean in 2026, signaling the onset of a strong and potentially historic El Niño. These events can affect weather around the world, and the intensity of recent El Niño events is raising alarm that, as global temperatures rise, they are becoming stronger and more destructive.

To understand how these climate patterns are changing, we need to understand what happened during El Niño events in the past, but observations go back only a few decades. So, my colleagues and I went to the Galápagos Islands – at the heart of the El Niño pattern – to find answers from some of nature’s best record keepers: corals.