El Niño forecasts, ancient oceans, and seabed protection explored on BBC Inside Science

Overview

In this edition of Inside Science from the BBC World Service, host Roland Pease chats with climate scientist Amanda Maycock about the oncoming El Niño and its near global reach, and with Scott Evans about ancient life in the oceans during the Ediacaran period. The discussion widens to the ecological costs of bottom trawling and the rebound observed in a Scottish protected area, before touching on data collection across the Pacific and other science news.

• El Niño forecasts and the spring predictability barrier
• Observing the Pacific with buoys, satellites, and autonomous systems
• Bottom trawling bans and seabed biodiversity rebound
• Old life in new places: insights from Ediacaran fossils in Canada

El Niño forecast and Pacific dynamics

The podcast opens with Gareth Mitchell outlining technologies used to monitor the vast Pacific Ocean, and Amanda Maycock explains how warm surface waters in the western Pacific and cooler deep waters in the east are connected through the trade winds. When El Niño develops, these winds weaken, allowing unusually warm subsurface waters to rise and spread eastward. This shift increases atmospheric convection and rainfall further east, altering weather patterns globally. The spring predictability barrier makes forecasting around the transition tricky, but current forecasts point to a strong or very strong El Niño by the upcoming northern-hemisphere winter. The discussion also covers how global surface temperatures respond to El Niño on top of background warming, raising the possibility of record global temperatures next year if the event strengthens.

Observing systems and data challenges

Gareth Mitchell discusses the Tropical Pacific Observing System, a major international effort to fill data gaps across the equatorial Pacific. Since the 1990s, networks of tethered buoys have delivered measurements of temperature, salinity, and currents, but newer autonomous buoys and enhanced satellite data are expanding coverage. The aim is to achieve higher resolution data over a broader region to improve long-range forecasts, which Maycock emphasizes as essential for understanding future decades of El Niño activity and its impacts.

From ocean depths to surface life: Ediacaran fossils in Canada

The program shifts to Scott Evans and the Mackenzie Mountains expedition, where five days of fieldwork yielded around 100 fossils, including six new North American species. The rocks date to roughly 580–600 million years ago, an era when animal life began to take larger, more complex forms. Evans describes an unusual deep-water setting, possibly below the photic zone, and explains how these fossils reveal early body plans that show front and back orientation and a basic body axis common to later animals. The fossils are compared with younger Australian discoveries, suggesting a potential deep-to-shallow water progression in early animal life and supporting hypotheses about stable deep-water environments fostering early complexity before colonization of shallower zones.

Bottom trawling and seabed protection: a hopeful rebound

The discussion returns to the seabed, focusing on a marine protected area south of Arran, Scotland, where bottom trawling has been banned for ten years. Amanda Vincent explains that the infauna—organisms living within sediments such as worms and mollusks—have shown notable recovery, with biodiversity and abundance increasing dramatically. The epifauna—the creatures living on the seabed surface—also show changes, though the response is more complex and slower. The conversation emphasizes that protecting bottom habitats does not eliminate fishing but can guide more sustainable practices, offering hope for broader ocean resilience when trawling pressure is reduced or managed more carefully. The broader point is that protecting critical seabed habitats yields tangible ecological benefits and underlines the importance of long-term protection to allow ecosystems to rebound from centuries of disturbance.

Submarine cables, climate stories, and bear bots

The episode also touches on the vulnerability of underwater cables to trawling activity and the real-world disruptions that can arise, such as a multi-kilometer outage in the Matsu Islands due to a trawler severing cables. Gareth then highlights NASA findings on a giant solar radio burst that lasted 19 days, an event that helps scientists refine how to track such bursts and their potential impact on satellites and power grids. The segment closes with a lighter but consequential note on wildlife: Japan’s growing bear population and the use of robotic wolves as deterrents, an example of how technology intersects with conservation as climate change shifts bear habitats and food sources. The program ends with a tease of more ocean science next week and a brief promotional interlude.

Takeaway themes

Across ocean physics, ancient life, marine conservation, space weather, and wildlife management, the podcast threads a single idea: understanding complex, interconnected systems requires better data, careful interpretation of past and present signals, and pragmatic strategies to balance human activity with the resilience of natural systems.