The multiple facets of El Nino Southern Oscillation in Chile

The coupling between ocean (El Nino) and atmosphere (Southern Oscillation) conditions has only recently come under sharp focus. El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has been labeled an excellent natural experiment that empirically demonstrates the teleconnections that may occur in planet Earth, illustrating how atmospheric-oceanographic phenomena may affect the biota, no only marine but also terrestrial. I make a summary review of how ENSO determines peculiar atmospheric and oceanographic conditions, thus affecting precipitation patterns in land masses, with cascading effects on marine and terrestrial plants, and on sea and land birds and mammals. I propose that the alternate phases of ENSO, namely El Nino/La Nina, should be explored in greater detail in order to make reasonable extrapolations about where global climate change may lead us. The latter has been considered simply as a steady increase in the temperature of the planet, but the Southern Oscillation shows that warm and cool phases alternate on very large geographical scales such as the entire Pacific Basin. That the two strongest ENSO events occurred at the end of the XX century (1982-83 and 1997-98) suggest that we should be more worried about the occurrence of increasingly more extreme events of El Nino and La Nina, rather than about a gradual warming of the climate.