One Pacific, Two Emergencies

El Niño’s Heat in the South and Hungry Whales in the Arctic

By Ángel Herrera Ulloa

Angel holds a PhD and directs the International Marine Mammal Project's Dolphin Safe program in Latin America.

Months ago, there was concern about El Niño and the possibility that it would turn into a “Niño Godzilla.”

Months later, El Niño is a monster. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) October 8 update reports sea surface temperatures more than 4°C (7.2℉) above normal in parts of the Eastern equatorial Pacific. The Niño 1+2 index, the area off Ecuador and northern Peru, reached +3.9°C (7.0℉) in September, while Niño in the central Pacific stood at +2.1°C (3.8℉). NOAA now gives an 83% chance that October–December will be the strongest El Niño season since records began in 1950.

The Copernicus Marine Service (Europe) keeps a public dashboard that plots temperature anomalies in the four standard Niño regions. The pattern is obvious: the strongest anomalies are in the easternmost area, the one pressed against the coast of South America. That matters. This is an Eastern Pacific El Niño, the kind that hits the Humboldt Current hardest, along with everything that lives off it.

The Humboldt Current is Going Hungry

The Humboldt Current system feeds a huge share of the world’s fish because cold, nutrient-rich water normally wells up along the coasts of Peru and Chile. This year the upwelling is losing. Peru’s Production Ministry closed the north-central anchoveta season on June 11 on the advice of the Peruvian Sea Institute (IMARPE), and researchers report that the anchoveta has moved deeper and farther offshore. The animals that eat it can’t follow. Since July, Peruvian media have reported dead Humboldt penguins and South American sea lions on the coast, and pelicans now wait around piers and city beaches for scraps. ENFEN, Peru’s El Niño commission, has not ruled out an “extraordinary” coastal event lasting into the first months of 2027.

Not every sighting is a symptom, though. When humpback whales appeared off San Bartolo, south of Lima, a Peruvian specialist pointed out that they were on their usual migration. The public needs to depend on accurate reports of the symptoms.

The International Marine Mammal Project (IMMP) monitors Dolphin Safe tuna fleets between Mexico and Chile, as part of our global efforts to verify that tuna fishermen are fishing in ways that do not harm dolphins. NOAA also describes a deeper-than-normal thermocline across the Eastern Pacific. When the warm water layer thickens, tuna redistribute, and the fleets go after them, often into waters they know less well. This is exactly when observer coverage and Dolphin Safe verification cannot slip, even if some in the industry argue that a bad year justifies cutting costs in a manner that might threaten dolphins.

Nine Thousand Kilometers North

At the other end of the Pacific, gray whales feed in the Bering and Chukchi seas. NOAA’s 2025 estimate put the eastern North Pacific population at about 13,000 animals, the lowest since the 1970s. By September of this year, 189 gray whales had stranded dead between Mexico and Alaska, almost more than in any of the last three years of the 2019–2023 Unusual Mortality Event. Many were thin. NOAA described a female that washed up on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula in late June as an adult in poor body condition.

It is important to be precise here: El Niño did not start the gray whale crisis. The main driver is Arctic warming. Less winter sea ice means less of the ice algae and other organic matter that sink to the seafloor and feed the small crustaceans gray whales suck out of the mud. The Chukchi Basin, once their richest pantry, has thinned out, and the whales have pushed north into the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Bowhead whales are shifting as well, staying north of the Bering Strait more often as the ice retreats.

Still, the Two Stories are Connected

Whales that leave the Arctic underfed this autumn will migrate south along the North American coast that a strong El Niño will warm and severely reduce the upwelling this winter. In recent years, starving grays have turned up feeding in places like San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound. Those emergency food sources are precisely what El Niño degrades.

The tropics and the Arctic also influence each other. A 2016 study in Nature Communications found that El Niño centered in the central Pacific tends to strengthen the polar vortex and slow summer ice melt over the Canada Basin. This year’s heat is concentrated in the east, so that brake should not be counted on.

Other work, led by scientists at the University at Albany, suggests that Arctic sea-ice loss may make strong El Niños more frequent. If that holds, the melting Arctic and the overheated equator are pushing each other along. And because very strong El Niños usually drive global temperatures higher the following year, the Arctic summer of 2027, when gray whales need to rebuild their fat, could be another warm one with reduced food supplies.

What is Being Asked

The data are free and updated daily. The Copernicus Marine Service and NOAA have given governments what they need to see this coming, so nobody gets to act surprised in 2027.

IMMP is in court to get the gray whale relisted under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and that petition deserves an answer now, not after another die-off. In Peru and Chile, fishery closures should account for what sea lions and penguins need to eat, not only for what the fishmeal plants can process. Across the Eastern Pacific, Dolphin Safe monitoring has to stay at full strength through the peak of this event.

A starving sea lion on a Peruvian beach and a gray whale washing up in Alaska are living in the same ocean. It is time it was managed as one.

Sources: NOAA Climate Prediction Center, ENSO Diagnostic Discussion (October 8, 2026); Copernicus Marine Service ENSO dashboard; Mongabay (July 2026); ENFEN/Panamericana (August 2026); PEER (July 2026); Anchorage Daily News (June–July 2026); Stewart et al., Science (2023); Hu et al., Nature Communications (2016); Deng et al., Science Advances (2024).

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The International Marine Mammal Project of Earth Island Institute is leading efforts to protect whales and dolphins around the world. Steps need to be taken to reduce global warming through phasing out the use of fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. In the meantime, further efforts to protect whales and other marine life will require major changes to prevent entanglements and ship strikes on whales seeking new food sources. Please donate to help whales survive!