Abstract The results presented in this Essay were revealed through quasi-regular interrogations of various online climate diagnostics bulletins and publications. These are compiled by climate scientists in various institutions around the world for use and reference by the wider climate community. Thus, we are looking to bring our findings to the attention of interested parties using the above material as the basis for discussion and further interrogation, not to conduct a full original analysis. We show evidence for a significant variation in the spatial pattern of the large-scale vertical zonal atmospheric circulation patterns across the equatorial Indo-Australasian domain of the eastern hemisphere during the major 2023-2024 El Niño event. The region of large-scale subsidence, and its associated teleconnection patterns, that are usually centered across Indonesia (the ‘Maritime Continent’) were displaced to the west over the equatorial Indian Ocean. In the record of El Niño events with readily available online dynamical tropospheric fields (one source from 1947 and the other from 1979), this has only been seen two other times, during the strong 1997-1998 El Niño and the weaker 1977-1978 event. These three events may well be consistent with internal variability, but at present the reason for such occurrences has not been established.