Related papers: Globally disruptive events show predictable timing…
A recent paper by Siraj & Loeb (2021) entitled "Breakup of a long-period comet as the origin of the dinosaur extinction" attempts to revive the perennial debate about what type of body hit the Earth 66 million years ago, triggering the…
Global Climate Models (GCMs) provide forecasts of future climate warming using a wide variety of highly sophisticated anthropogenic CO2 emissions models as input, each based on the evolution of four emissions "drivers": population p,…
Over its multibillion-year history, the Earth has experienced a wide range of climates. The long-term climate is controlled by the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, which is regulated by marine sequestration through chemical…
The decryption of the temporal sequence of volcanic eruptions is a key step in better anticipating future events. Volcanic activity is the result of a complex interaction between internal and external processes, with time scales spanning…
It is shown that global climate exhibits chaotic response to solar forcing variability in a vast range of timescales: from annual to multi-millennium. Unlike linear systems, where periodic forcing leads to periodic response, nonlinear…
It is customarily assumed that Earth-striking meteoroids are completely random, and that all the impacts must be interpreted as uncorrelated events distributed according to Poisson statistics. If this is correct, their impact dates must be…
A reliable understanding of the Earth system is essential for the life quality of modern society. Natural hazards are the cause of most life and resource losses. The ability to define the conditions for a sustainable development of…
The astronomical theory of Milankovitch relates the changes of Earth' past climate to variations in insolation caused by oscillations of the orbital parameters. However, this theory has problems to account for some major observed phenomena…
Ecosystems are complex systems, currently experiencing several threats associated with global warming, intensive exploitation, and human-driven habitat degradation. Such threats are pushing ecosystems to the brink of collapse. Because of a…
In the nucleated instability picture of gas giant formation, the final stage is the rapid accretion of a massive gas envelope by a solid core, bringing about a tenfold or more increase in mass. This tends to trigger the scattering of any…
The inflationary hot big bang model of cosmology explains the birth of the universe, the appearance of atoms and that of large-scale structures, altogether omitting any reference to the living world. Yet, like the physical world, the living…
Atmospheric flows exhibit fluctuations of all scales (space -time) ranging from turbulence (millimeters-seconds) to climate (thousands of kilometers-years). The apparently random fluctuations however exhibit long-range spatio-temporal…
An intriguing problem in climate science is the existence of Earth's glacial cycles. We show that it is possible to generate these periodic changes in climate by means of the Earth's carbon cycle as the main determinant factor. The carbon…
Statistical analysis indicates that the fossil extinction record is compatible with a distribution of extinction events whose frequency is related to their size by a power law with an exponent close to two. This result is in agreement with…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Planets between 1-4 Earth radii with orbital periods <100 days are strikingly common. The migration model proposes that super-Earths migrate inwards and pile up at the disk inner edge in chains of mean motion resonances. After gas disk…
Herein we show that the historical records of mid-latitude auroras from 1700 to 1966 present oscillations with periods of about 9, 10-11, 20-21, 30 and 60 years. The same frequencies are found in proxy and instrumental global surface…
Despite the increase in observational data on exoplanets, the processes that lead to the formation of planets are still not well understood. But thanks to the high number of known exoplanets, it is now possible to look at them as a…
(Abridged) In planetary systems with two or more giant planets, dynamical instabilities can lead to collisions or ejections through strong planet--planet scattering. Previous studies for simple initial configurations with two equal-mass…
Extreme events, such as rogue waves, earthquakes and stock market crashes, occur spontaneously in many dynamical systems. Because of their usually adverse consequences, quantification, prediction and mitigation of extreme events are highly…