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Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…
We present experimental data and their theoretical interpretation for the decay rates of temperature fluctuations in a thin layer of a fluid heated from below and confined between parallel horizontal plates. The measurements were made with…
Dynamical phase transitions can occur in isolated quantum systems that are brought out of equilibrium by sudden parameter changes. We discuss the characterization of such dynamical phase transitions based on the statistics of produced…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
We consider a model for substrate-depletion oscillations in genetic systems, based on a stochastic differential equation with a slowly evolving external signal. We show the existence of critical transitions in the system. We apply two…
Many rare weather events, including hurricanes, droughts, and floods, dramatically impact human life. To accurately forecast these events and characterize their climatology requires specialized mathematical techniques to fully leverage the…
Studies of QCD phase transition signals are often conducted under spatially uniform temperature conditions. However, the influence of spatial temperature gradients on the signals emerging at the phase interface in the fireball generated by…
The understanding and prediction of sudden changes in flow patterns is of paramount importance in the analysis of geophysical flows as these rare events relate to critical phenomena such as atmospheric blocking, the weakening of the Gulf…
A sudden transition to a state of high amplitude limit cycle oscillations is catastrophic in a thermo-fluid system. Conventionally, upon varying the control parameter, a sudden transition is observed as an abrupt jump in the amplitude of…
We explore the connection between migration patterns and emergent behaviors of evolving populations in spatially heterogeneous environments. Despite extensive studies in ecologically and medically important systems, a unifying framework…
There is evidence that ice age cycles are paced by astronomical forcing, suggesting some kind of synchronisation phenomenon. Here, we identify the type of such synchronisation and explore systematically its uniqueness and robustness using a…
When the climate system is forced, e.g. by emission of greenhouse gases, it responds on multiple time scales. As temperatures rise, feedback processes might intensify or weaken. Current methods to analyze feedback strength, however, do not…
The global ocean meridional overturning circulation (GMOC) is central for ocean transport and climate variations. However, a comprehensive picture of its historical mean state and variability remains vague due to limitations in modelling…
Small perturbations to systems near critical points of quantum phase transitions can induce drastic changes in the system properties. Here I show that this sensitivity can be exploited for weak-signal detection applications. This is done by…
Evidence of past climate variations are stored in ice and indicate glacial-interglacial cycles characterized by three dominant time periods of 20kyr, 40kyr, and 100kyr. We study the scaling properties of temperature proxy records of four…
Global Climate Models are key tools for predicting the future response of the climate system to a variety of natural and anthropogenic forcings. Here we show how to use statistical mechanics to construct operators able to flexibly predict…
Mass extinction is a phenomenon in the history of life on Earth when a considerable number of species go extinct over a relatively short period of time. The magnitude of extinction varies between the events, the most well known are the…
The response of precipitation extremes to climate change is considered using results from theory, modeling, and observations, with a focus on the physical factors that control the response. Observations and simulations with climate models…
A "toy" model, simple and elementary enough for an undergraduate class, of the temperature dependence of the greenhouse (mid-IR) absorption by atmospheric water vapor implies a bistable climate system. The stable states are glaciation and…
We explore the critical properties of the recently discovered finite-time dynamical phase transition in the non-equilibrium relaxation of Ising magnets after a temperature quench. The transition is characterized by a sudden switch in the…