According to meteorologists, there could be another El Niño brewing in the Pacific Ocean. And this could be a big one. If climatic conditions conspire in the warming waters of Earth’s largest ocean, a so-called “super El Niño” could start this summer and push 2027 air temperatures higher than ever. Searing droughts, torrential rainstorms, and other extreme weather events could result around the globe.

Briefly, El Niños are part of a broader, natural climatic cycling that’s rooted in water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. When surface waters in the Eastern Pacific, near the Americas, are abnormally warm, the trade winds that typically blow steadily from east to west weaken, disrupting the normal distribution of heat around the globe and the resultant weather patterns. That’s an El Niño. When Pacific surface waters are cooler than normal, we get a La Niña. These tend to oscillate back and forth every three to seven years, with periods of neutral patterns interspersed. And humans have been formally reporting the shifting climate pattern for almost 450 years.

In 1578, as Spain was expanding its empire throughout the New World and subjugating Indigenous populations who had occupied those lands for millennia, disaster struck the northern coast of Peru. Weather patterns abruptly changed, and rains poured, causing landslides to thunder down mountainsides. Widespread flooding rotted the crops of Indigenous people as they stood in the fields. Plagues of giant rodents flowed into those fields feasting on the ruined harvests. The proportions were almost Biblical.

Scenes like these were recorded by Francisco de Alcocer, a surveyor sent to Peru from Spain in 1578 to inspect the devastation. His observations constitute the first formal descriptions of an El Niño event. About half of Alcocer’s original document survives, and researchers at the University of Maine have been translating it from 16th-century Spanish into English for the past 5 years.

Read more: “Our Boiling Seas”

Climate science graduate student Heather Landazuri was instrumental in that translation effort. “Archival documents can be a powerful way to learn about past weather patterns,” she said in a 2021 statement. “It reminds everyone that these are extremely important sources for more than just the one thing, or more than just telling one story about a labor uprising and requests for aid, imperialism, and colonialism—there’s more to it than that. We can look at resilience. We can look at environmental change. We can look at coping.”

The Indigenous people who suffered the ravages of the 1578 El Niño were used to coping with such climatic shifts. For centuries they had moved their fields to higher elevations or altered their diets when El Niños bore down on them. But under Spanish occupation, their populations were forced to live on reservations, called reducciones, where they could not move freely and were made to pay tributes to their Spanish lords. By 1580, according to Alcocer’s document, the Indigenous population of the area was asking the Spanish for a pause in paying these tributes so they could rebuild their traditional agriculture. But the Spanish refused, opting instead to rebuild the infrastructure they needed to produce cash crops, such as corn and cotton.

More than four centuries later, we’re still dealing with El Niños. As with anything climate-related, there’s a healthy amount of uncertainty baked into any predictions of when and how hard they’ll hit. But the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration places odds on whether or not El Niños or La Niñas are headed our way. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center gave El Niño a 61 percent chance of emerging and persisting through at least the end of 2026.

What makes this year’s a “super” El Niño is that sea surface temperatures are projected to spike by at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, where climatologists declare a normal El Niño at any temperatures that are at least 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.

While the first formal description of the damages that El Niño can wreak was penned almost 450 years ago, the term “super El Niño” wasn’t coined until 2003, in a paper written by Australian researchers. Although our best science can only tell us that we might experience such a climatic shift starting this year, I for one am not feeling super hopeful about the weather our planet will see in the coming months and years.

Enjoying Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Lemonsoup14 / Adobe Stock