About 4,000 miles to the southwest of Boston, in the lonely, vast, and desolate tropical waters of the equatorial Pacific, one of nature’s most powerful phenomena is about to spread its influence across the entire globe. The domino effect that starts here will create natural disasters, alter billions of dollars worth of crop yield (Hi John Henry! How are your soybean futures looking?), decide the weather at your cousin’s wedding, and of course, impact the baseball season.
The tropical Pacific can do all of this because it serves as the driver of Earth’s climate machine. It’s so unfathomably enormous that there’s actually a point in the Pacific off the southern coast of Peru where if you when straight down through the crust and the core and came out the other side of the planet, you would end up off the northern coast of Vietnam, and still in the tropical Pacific Ocean!