Thresholds of catastrophe in the Earth system
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e1700906.full.pdf
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530.59 KB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Rothman, Daniel H.
Date Issued
September 2017
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Rothman, Daniel H. “Thresholds of Catastrophe in the Earth System.” Science Advances, vol. 3, no. 9, Sept. 2017, p. e1700906.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The history of the Earth system is a story of change. Some changes are gradual and benign, but others, especially those associated with catastrophic mass extinction, are relatively abrupt and destructive. What sets one group apart from the other? Here, I hypothesize that perturbations of Earth's carbon cycle lead to mass extinction if they exceed either a critical rate at long time scales or a critical size at short time scales. By analyzing 31 carbon isotopic events during the past 542 million years, I identify the critical rate with a limit imposed by mass conservation. Identification of the crossover time scale separating fast from slow events then yields the critical size. The modern critical size for the marine carbon cycle is roughly similar to the mass of carbon that human activities will likely have added to the oceans by the year 2100.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700906
