El Nino

Dr. Robert Cushman Murphy, of the American Museum of Natural History, returned lately from studying ocean currents off the Peruvian and Ecua- dorian coasts. Last week, he told this story:

Until last January, there had been no rain at the little cable port of Santa Elena since 1919. Marshes about the village had long been withered dry. Cattle, unfoddered for months, were shambling bags of bones, the sheep and goats desperately gnawed bales of paper ticker-tape thrown out by the telegraph company.

It was the same for miles around: no rain here for 10 years, here for 34 years, here since Pizarro, here ever. The left shoulder of the South American continent is accustomed to wearing a heavy, blistering coat of sunburn. From lower Ecuador, through the length of Peru to mid-Chile, it is known as the "Dry Coast."

The cause of such Saharan aridity is the chilly Humboldt Current, flowing up from the South Pacific. The Humboldt gives off moisture, of course, but onshore winds from it, striking the warm land, rise and expand, dropping none of their burden as rain.

Farther out at sea, however, there flows a warm current from the north, called El Nino (The Child) because it arrives each year at Christmas time. The few rains that have fallen on the Dry Coast have been blessings from El Nino.

Last winter, El Nino was delayed a trifle. It did not reach Eucador until the second week in January. Dr. Murphy and his companion, Van Campen Heilner, went out in launches to meet it, measure its speed, density, temperature and so on. They noted that the sea's heat rose more than 60DEG that one day. Schools of flying fish appeared, shoals of hammerhead sharks, flocks of seabirds. Then, from what took place on shore, they noted that El Nino had come in vaster volume, gone farther south then ever before in history.

All down the Dry Coast, torrents of rain were falling. It rained for days, for weeks, for two months continually. Great rivers came out of the mountains, broad lakes flooded the plains. The ground, hardened by years of baking, at first shed the water in sheets. Then hardy seeds sprouted forth; and, where there had been deserts, lush meadows appeared. The emaciated cattle of Santa Elena gorged and fattened. At Talaro, an inland oil settlement which had lain lifeness in January, a network of streams covered the waste land in March, filling the desert and the very village streets with myriad spawn and minnows.

But the blessing of El Nino proved overabundant. With their arid lands made a paradise, the natives found themselves economically impoverished. Along the Dry Coast, roofs, never made rainproof, fell in; houses, made of mud, sank to the ground in soggy heaps. Water-filled boats sank. As the waters rose, cattle, gardens, buildings, whole farms and villages were swept from the earth into the sea. The largest losses, practically total, were suffered by the guano* industry. Islands off Peru from which 119,000 tons of guano (nine million dollars' worth) were mined last year, were stripped of their ancient deposits by the deluge, which had the double effect of scouring and of converting the guano chemically into rapidly evaporating ammonias.

*Guano, bird dung, valuable because of its nitrate content for fertilizer. When the rains came, the nitrates, escaping as ammonia, left the guano agriculturally impotent.