What effect would a well-placed tsunami have on El Niño?
Asked by a South African. It would have no effect. The time and space scales are completely different. El Niño represents the large-scale, but slow, redistribution of heat across the tropical Pacific. A tsunami is a short-lived pulse in which the entire thickness of the ocean shifts position a small distance. The actual horizontal motion of each water particle in a tsunami is very small, probably less than 30 meters in the open ocean (it can become much greater when the wave runs up on the continental shelf, of course, but that does not affect the open-ocean temperatures). El Niño, on the other hand, involves the transport of water masses over thousands of kilometers, but over a period of months. For a possible analogy, consider a bathtub filled with cool water. If you turn on the hot water tap, the heat spreads around the bathtub over a period of a few minutes (assuming it goes in gently and you don’t stir it). That’s like El Niño. But if you drop a pebble into the tub, the wave it ge
