The equatorial Pacific already drives Earth’s biggest natural year-to-year climate cycle in El Niño and La Niña. There is evidence that the same dynamic drives ice age cycles, via a particular “Equatorially Symmetric La Niña” mode. Natural ESLN emerged in 1998 in response to a minute 0.02 J/kg increase in tidal potential.

The Equatorial Undercurrent is as big as the Gulf Stream. A passive drogue array in the shear layer below it can convert kinetic energy into mixing energy, to controllably create ESLN.

The Equatorial Undercurrent Mixing Project aims to leverage this natural mechanism of global cooling.

Project background:

1. December 2024 AGU abstract: Geoengineering Proposal to Leverage Earth’s Natural Cooling Mechanism. Poster

2. Internal Tide Resonance in El Niño Amplification Duke & Werntz 2024. Duke & Werntz 2024 SCIENCE submission August 2024

3. The tropical hypothesis revisited: Is Pacific countercurrent consolidation the common mechanism of global cooling in interannual, millennial, and orbital time scales? John H. Duke, 4-11-2011

4. 2011 World Climate Research Program conference poster presents the hypothesis that tidal forcing is the common mechanism of global cooling in interannual, millennial, and orbital time scales: DUKE POSTER 2011 WCRP conference

5. Do periodic consolidations of Pacific countercurrents trigger global cooling by equatorially symmetric La Niña? Climate of the Past Discussions, 6, 905-961, 2010

6. 2009 Geoengineering proposal to leverage Earth’s natural cooling mechanisms

7. 2008 EGU abstract: A proposal to force vertical mixing of the Pacific Equatorial Undercurrent to create a system of equatorially trapped coupled convection that counteracts global warming

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