What do abrupt changes in ocean circulation and Earth’s climate, shifts in wildlife populations and ecosystems, the global finance market and its system-wide crashes, and asthma attacks and epileptic seizures have in common?
According to a paper published this week in the journal Nature, all share generic early-warning signals that indicate a critical threshold of change dead ahead.
In the paper, Martin Scheffer of Wageningen University in The Netherlands and co-authors, including William Brock and Stephen Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., found that similar symptoms occur in many systems as they approach a critical state of transition.
“It’s increasingly clear that many complex systems have critical thresholds — ‘tipping points’ — at which these systems shift abruptly from one state to another,” write the scientists in their paper.
Especially relevant, they discovered, is that “catastrophic bifurcations,” a diverging of the ways, propel a system toward a new state once a certain threshold is exceeded.
Like Robert Frost‘s well-known poem about two paths diverging in a wood, a system follows a trail for so long, then often comes to a switchpoint at which it will strike out in a completely new direction.
That system may be as tiny as the alveoli in human lungs or as large as global climate.
“These are compelling insights into the transitions in human and natural systems,” says Henry Gholz, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Environmental Biology, which supported the research along with NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences.
“The information comes at a critical time — a time when Earth’s and, our fragility, have been highlighted by global financial collapses, debates over health care reform, and concern about rapid change in climate and ecological systems.”
It all comes down to what scientists call “squealing,” or “variance amplification near critical points,” when a system moves back and forth between two states.
“A system may shift permanently to an altered state if an underlying slow change in conditions persists, moving it to a new situation,” says Carpenter.
Eutrophication in lakes, shifts in climate, and epileptic seizures all are preceded by squealing.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Dead Ahead: Similar Early Warning Signals of Change in Climate (usnews.com)
- Is There a Climate-Change Tipping Point? (time.com)
- Scientists Seek Warning Signs for Catastrophic Tipping Points (wired.com)
- UW gets $126 million grant — largest ever — for ocean observatory (seattlepi.com)
