LA Times Boiling Point News Letter Feature: This hidden gem in ocean science unlocked the secrets of El Niño

This might come as a surprise, unless you’re plugged into ocean science lore: The oldest and longest-running marine ecosystem monitoring program in the world is based right off the coast of Southern California.

Every season, for more than three-quarters of a century, researchers with the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations — or CalCOFI, for those in the know — have sailed hundreds of miles off the Golden State’s coast and collected a dizzying array of zooplankton, microscopic plant matter, larvae and all manner of fish. Like taking a pulse of the ocean at particular moments in time, generations of scientists have meticulously documented water temperature, salinity, acidity, oxygen levels and dozens of other data points that have become the gold standard for understanding the ocean and how it’s changing.

Nowhere else on the planet has such a large swath of ocean been studied as thoroughly and for so long, and much of our modern approach to oceanography and weather forecasts can be traced back to this hidden gem in marine science. In fact, it’s thanks to CalCOFI that in 1958, scientists first pieced together that El Niño (a term being used locally in Peru at the time) was a climate phenomenon that wreaked havoc not just in Latin America — but also in California, and in turn, the world.