Coral extracted from a remote central Pacific island has helped NSF-funded scientists at California's Scripps Institution of Oceanography construct a valuable new record of climate conditions during the 20th century. The record, which allowed researchers to trace sea surface conditions over a 112-year- period, may hold implications for long-range climate forecasting and predictability, a result of the central tropical Pacific's influence on climate conditions around the world.

With samples from a tiny Pacific atoll called Palmyra, scientists Kim Cobb and Christopher Charles devised a new coral record that shows a 12- to 13-year cyclical pattern of temperatures in the Pacific that is related to similar patterns in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

"This new, highly accurate coral record shows that there are processes that connect these ocean basins on time scales much longer than El Nino, which operates over a three- to seven-year period," Charles says.

Climate scientists have developed models that outline several scenarios for air-sea interactions, operating on cycles known as "decadal variability." However, proof from the field has been sparse. Using mass spectrometry analysis, Cobb was able to determine exactly how monthly seawater temperatures changed, leading to a detailed climate record for the tropical Pacific. [Cheryl Dybas]