Climate change could alter the El Nino cycle in the Pacific, affecting fish stocks and the distribution of nutrients in the ocean, new research suggests.

Scientists recently noticed that El Nino warming is stronger in the Central Pacific  than the Eastern Pacific, a phenomenon they call El Nino Modoki, after the Japanese term for “similar, but different.”

Last year, the journal Nature published a paper that found climate change is behind this shift from El Nino to El Nino Modoki.

While the findings of that paper are still subject to debate, a new paper in the journal Nature Geoscience presents evidence that El Nino Modoki affects long-term changes in currents in the North Pacific Ocean.

The research was done by Emanuele Di Lorenzo, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.