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A large sample of planet-planet scattering events for three planet systems with different orbital separations and masses is analyzed with a multiple regression model. The dependence of the time for the onset of instability on the masses of…
The most significant periodicities in the terrestrial impact crater record are due to the human-signal: the bias of assigning integer values for the crater ages. This bias seems to have eluded the proponents and opponents of real…
Global scale impacts modify the physical or thermal state of a substantial fraction of a target asteroid. Specific effects include accretion, family formation, reshaping, mixing and layering, shock and frictional heating, fragmentation,…
Giant planet migration appears widespread among planetary systems in our Galaxy. However, the timescales of this process, which reflect the underlying dynamical mechanisms, are not well constrained, even within the solar system. Since…
The origin of the Chicxulub impactor, which is attributed as the cause of the K/T mass extinction event, is an unsolved puzzle. The background impact rates of main-belt asteroids and long-period comets have been previously dismissed as…
We present a model for evolution and extinction in large ecosystems. The model incorporates the effects of interactions between species and the influences of abiotic environmental factors. We study the properties of the model by approximate…
We introduce a new model for large scale evolution and extinction in which species are organized into food chains. The system evolves by two processes: origination/speciation and extinction. In the model, extinction of a given species can…
We propose a framework for studying predictability of extreme events in complex systems. Major conceptual elements -- direct cascading or fragmentation, spatial dynamics, and external driving -- are combined in a classical age-dependent…
We have explored the temporal variability of the seismicity at global scale over the last 124 years, as well as its potential drivers. To achieve this, we constructed and analyzed an averaged global seismicity curve for earthquakes of…
Planet--Planet scattering is an efficient and robust dynamical mechanism for producing eccentric exoplanets. Coupled to tidal interactions with the central star, it can also explain close--in giant planets on circularized and potentially…
We calculate the expected flux profile of comets into the planetary system from the Oort cloud arising from Galactic tides and encounters with molecular clouds. We find that both periodic and sporadic bombardment episodes, with amplitudes…
The complex spatiotemporal patterns of atmospheric flows resulting from the cooperative existence of fluctuations ranging in size from millimeters to thousands of kilometers are found to exhibit long-range spatial and temporal correlations…
We use a simple yet Earth-like atmospheric model to propose a new framework for understanding the mathematics of blocking events. Analysing error growth rates along a very long model trajectory, we show that blockings are associated with…
The climate record preserved in polar glaciers, mountain glaciers, and widespread cave deposits shows repeated occurrence of abrupt global transitions between cold/dry stadial and warm/wet interstadial states during glacial periods. These…
The striking fractal geometry of strange attractors underscores the generative nature of chaos: like probability distributions, chaotic systems can be repeatedly measured to produce arbitrarily-detailed information about the underlying…
I study a recently proposed statistical model of earthquake dynamics that incorporates aging as a fundamental ingredient. The model is known to generate earthquake sequences that quantitatively reproduce the spatial and temporal clustering…
Comet disintegration proceeds both through sublimation and discrete splitting events. The cross-sectional area of material ejected by a comet may, within days, become many times greater than that of the Earth, making encounters with such…
The physical basis of chaos in the solar system is now better understood: in all cases investigated so far, chaotic orbits result from overlapping resonances. Perhaps the clearest examples are found in the asteroid belt. Overlapping…
Atmospheric flows exhibit long-range spatiotemporal correlations manifested as the fractal geometry to the global cloud cover pattern concomitant with inverse power law form for power spectra of temporal fluctuations on all space-time…
We study a lattice model of a multi-species prey-predator system. Numerical results show that for a small mutation rate the model develops irregular long-period oscillatory behavior with sizeable changes in a number of species. The…