Related papers: Triggering A Climate Change Dominated "Anthropocen…
Vegetation often understood merely as the result of long-term climate conditions. However, vegetation itself plays a fundamental role in shaping Earth's climate by regulating the energy, water, and biogeochemical cycles across terrestrial…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
Mounting evidence indicates that our planet might experience runaway effects associated to rising temperatures and ecosystem overexploitation, leading to catastrophic shifts on short time scales. Remediation scenarios capable of…
TRAPPIST-1 is an ultra-cool dwarf hosting a system consisting of seven planets. While orbital properties, radii and masses of the planets are nowadays well constrained, one of the open fascinating issues is the possibility that an…
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…
Life has had a dramatic impact on the composition of Earth's atmosphere over time, which suggests that statistical studies of other inhabited planets' atmospheres could reveal how they co-evolve with life. While many evolutionary pathways…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
Complex Earth System Models are widely utilised to make conditional statements about the future climate under some assumptions about changes in future atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations; these statements are often referred to as…
What kind of environment may exist on terrestrial planets around other stars? In spite of the lack of direct observations, it may not be premature to speculate on exoplanetary climates, for instance to optimize future telescopic…
A set of idealized experiments are performed to analyze the competing effects of declining atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the opening of an ocean gateway, and varying orbital parameters. These forcing mechanisms, which influence the global…
Galaxy evolution reveals itself not only through the evolving properties of galaxies themselves but also through its impact on the surrounding environment. The intergalactic medium in particular holds a fossil record of past galaxy…
Improving observations of ocean heat content show that Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum. The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.59 \pm 0.15 W/m2…
The increasing frequency of global climate extremes has significantly impacted the terrestrial carbon cycle. Extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts, and extreme precipitation pose serious threats to ecosystem carbon…
Feeding a larger and wealthier global population without transgressing ecological limits is increasingly challenging, as rising food demand (especially for animal products) intensifies pressure on ecosystems, accelerates deforestation, and…
The emergence of collective cooperation in competitive environments is a well-known phenomenon in biology, economics, and social systems. While most evolutionary game models focus on the evolution of strategies for a fixed game, how…
Carbonate-silicate weathering feedback is thought to stabilize Earth's climate on geologic timescales. If climate warms, faster mineral dissolution and increased rainfall speed up weathering, increasing CO2 drawdown and opposing the initial…
We identify the phase of a cycle as a new critical factor for tipping points (critical transitions) in cyclic systems subject to time-varying external conditions. As an example, we consider how contemporary climate variability induces…
The eco-evolutionary dynamics of species are fundamentally linked to the energetic constraints of its constituent individuals. Of particular importance is the interplay between reproduction and the dynamics of starvation and recovery. To…
Molecular oxygen in our atmosphere has increased from less than a part per million in the Archean Eon, to a fraction of a percent in the Proterozoic, and finally to modern levels during the Phanerozoic. The ozone layer formed with the early…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…