Now then, this second arm--more accurately, a collar--forms a ring of warm water around a section of cool, tranquil, motionless ocean called the Sargasso Sea.
And I think of those months to make this journey out to Midway slapped in the middle of North Pacific Gyre, what's thought to be the biggest garbage patch in the world's oceans in the moment.
In the air, the Walker Circulation gets stronger which is the circulation of air rising over the warm waters and sinking back down over those cooler waters.
It's not 100% clear why this happened, but it might relate to changes in ocean circulation that took place when North and South America finally came together, and water could no longer circulate between the Pacific and the Atlantic.
During El Nino episodes, normal patterns of tropical precipitation and atmospheric circulation are disrupted, triggering extreme climate events around the globe, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Climate scientists are pretty confident that if human emissions of greenhouse gases follow worst case scenarios, we'd melt enough ice to see some slow down in this ocean circulation.
And changes in looping air patterns also alter things like the jet stream across the U.S. and tends to bring cooler weather to the south and warmer to the north.
The heat that releases into the atmosphere shifts around some of the big air circulation patterns that influence weather all over the world. That heat also amps up global temperatures.
" And so those cooler ocean temperatures led to less moisture being brought by monsoon circulation in the summertime, when that region gets most of its rainfall."
Not only can this fire, smoke, and instability in the atmosphere lead to massive thunderstorms, they could potentially alter atmospheric circulation around the globe.