Thresholds of catastrophe in the Earth system. Rothman, D. H. Science Advances, 3(9):e1700906, September, 2017. 00000
Thresholds of catastrophe in the Earth system [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
The history of the Earth system is a story of change. Some changes are gradual and benign, but others, especially those associated with catastrophic mass extinction, are relatively abrupt and destructive. What sets one group apart from the other? Here, I hypothesize that perturbations of Earth’s carbon cycle lead to mass extinction if they exceed either a critical rate at long time scales or a critical size at short time scales. By analyzing 31 carbon isotopic events during the past 542 million years, I identify the critical rate with a limit imposed by mass conservation. Identification of the crossover time scale separating fast from slow events then yields the critical size. The modern critical size for the marine carbon cycle is roughly similar to the mass of carbon that human activities will likely have added to the oceans by the year 2100. The geochemical record of past disruptions of Earth’s carbon cycle reveals thresholds beyond which mass extinction occurs. The geochemical record of past disruptions of Earth’s carbon cycle reveals thresholds beyond which mass extinction occurs.
@article{rothman_thresholds_2017,
	title = {Thresholds of catastrophe in the {Earth} system},
	volume = {3},
	copyright = {Copyright © 2017 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.},
	issn = {2375-2548},
	url = {http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/e1700906},
	doi = {10.1126/sciadv.1700906},
	abstract = {The history of the Earth system is a story of change. Some changes are gradual and benign, but others, especially those associated with catastrophic mass extinction, are relatively abrupt and destructive. What sets one group apart from the other? Here, I hypothesize that perturbations of Earth’s carbon cycle lead to mass extinction if they exceed either a critical rate at long time scales or a critical size at short time scales. By analyzing 31 carbon isotopic events during the past 542 million years, I identify the critical rate with a limit imposed by mass conservation. Identification of the crossover time scale separating fast from slow events then yields the critical size. The modern critical size for the marine carbon cycle is roughly similar to the mass of carbon that human activities will likely have added to the oceans by the year 2100.
The geochemical record of past disruptions of Earth’s carbon cycle reveals thresholds beyond which mass extinction occurs.
The geochemical record of past disruptions of Earth’s carbon cycle reveals thresholds beyond which mass extinction occurs.},
	language = {en},
	number = {9},
	urldate = {2017-09-26},
	journal = {Science Advances},
	author = {Rothman, Daniel H.},
	month = sep,
	year = {2017},
	note = {00000},
	keywords = {biodiversity, boundaries, climate, collapse},
	pages = {e1700906},
	file = {Rothman - 2017 - Thresholds of catastrophe in the Earth system.pdf:C\:\\Users\\rsrs\\Documents\\Zotero Database\\storage\\BDNJZESP\\Rothman - 2017 - Thresholds of catastrophe in the Earth system.pdf:application/pdf}
}

Downloads: 0