Slowing down as an early warning signal for abrupt climate change - PubMed (original) (raw)

Eight reconstructed time series of abrupt climate shifts in the past. (A) The end of the greenhouse Earth, (M) the end of the Younger Dryas, (K) the Bølling-Alleröd transition, (O) the desertification of North Africa, (I) the end of the last glaciation, and (G, E, and F) the ends of earlier glaciations. In all cases the dynamics of the system slow down before the transition, as revealed by an increasing trend in autocorrelation (B, D, F, H, J, L, N, and P). The gray bands identify transition phases. The arrows mark the width of the moving window used to compute slowness. The smooth gray line through the time series is the Gaussian kernel function used to filter out slow trends. Data in A come from tropical Pacific sediment core records, data in M are from the Cariaco basin sediment, data in K come from the Greenland GISP2 ice core, data in O from the sediment core ODP Hole 658C off the west coast of Africa, and data presented in C, E, G, and I are from the Antarctica Vostok ice core (additional details are in

supporting information (SI) Table S1

and

Fig. S1

).