Related papers: A phase-space description of the Earth System in t…
It is shown that the Earth System (ES) can, due to the impact of human activities, exhibit chaotic behaviour. Our arguments are based on the assumption that the ES can be described by a Landau-Ginzburg model, which, in itself, predicts that…
It is proposed, based on the Landau-Ginzburg Theory of phase transitions, that the transition of the Earth System from the stable conditions of the Holocene to the human driven condition of the Anthropocene is, actually, a phase transition,…
A classification scheme for rocky planets is proposed, based on a description of the Earth System in terms of the Landau-Ginzburg Theory of phase transitions. Three major equilibrium states can be identified and the associated planetary…
We develop a classification scheme for the evolutionary state of planets based on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of their coupled systems, including the presence of a biosphere and the possibility of what we call an agency-dominated…
At a time when humanity has achieved global dominance at a scale that was previously thought impossible, it might also face an existential threat due to the consequences of that overwhelming influence on our common home, the Earth System…
Resilience is a property of social, ecological, social-ecological and biophysical systems. It describes the capacity of a system to cope with, adapt to and innovate in response to a changing surrounding. Given the current climate change…
We propose a new way of investigating phase transitions in the context of information theory. We use an information-entropic measure of spatial complexity known as configurational entropy (CE) to quantify both the storage and exchange of…
The long-term temperature response to a given change in CO2 forcing, or Earth-system sensitivity (ESS), is a key parameter quantifying our understanding about the relationship between changes in Earth's radiative forcing and the resulting…
The Anthropocene is characterized by close interdependencies between the natural Earth system and the human society, posing novel challenges to model development. Here we present a conceptual model describing the long-term coevolution of…
Many aspects of anthropogenic global change, such as land cover change, biodiversity loss and the intensification of agricultural production, threaten the natural biosphere. These aspects seem somewhat disjunct and specific so that it is…
The climate system's nonlinear dynamics is influenced by various external forcings and internal feedbacks that can give rise to regional and even global tipping points that may lead to significant and potentially irreversible changes.…
The Anthropocene is a proposed time subdivision of the earth's history correlated to the strong human perturbation of the ecosystem. Much debate is ongoing about what date should be considered as the start of the Anthropocene, but much less…
The role of thermodynamics in the evolution of systems evolving under purely gravitational forces is not completely established. Both the infinite range and singularity in the Newtonian force law preclude the use of standard techniques.…
The East model has a dynamical phase transition between an active (fluid) and inactive (glass) state. We show that this phase transition generalizes to "softened" systems where constraint violations are allowed with small but finite…
The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis considers that greenhouse gas concentrations should have declined during the Holocene in absence of humankind activity, leading to glacial inception around the present. It partly relies on the fact that…
The study of critical phenomena and phase transitions is an important part of modern condensed matter physics. In this regard, the phenomenological Landau theory has been extraordinarily useful. Hereby we present an alternative theoretical…
Traditionally, phase transitions are defined in the thermodynamic limit only. We propose a new formulation of equilibrium thermo-dynamics that is based entirely on mechanics and reflects just the {\em geometry and topology} of the N-body…
We explore the potential multistability of the climate for a planet around the habitable zone. We focus on conditions reminiscent to those of the Earth system, but our investigation aims at presenting a general methodology for dealing with…
The understanding of the fundamental properties of the climate system has long benefitted from the use of simple numerical models able to parsimoniously represent the essential ingredients of its processes. Here we introduce a new model for…
The goal of this paper is to explore the potential multistability of the climate of a planet around the habitable zone. A thorough investigation of the thermodynamics of the climate system is performed for very diverse conditions of energy…