Climate Past Provides "Early Warning" For Today's Planetary Tipping Points: Study

Climate tipping points -- which are irrevocable over centuries or longer -- are thresholds past which large and rapid changes to the natural world may occur.

Abrupt disruptions to Earth's climate thousands of years ago that caused extreme sea-level rise and mass ice cap melting can serve as an early warning system for today's planetary tipping points, according to new research. Climate tipping points -- which are irrevocable over centuries or longer -- are thresholds past which large and rapid changes to the natural world may occur. They include looming catastrophes such as the melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and West Antarctica, which contain enough frozen water to lift oceans more than a dozen metres (40 feet). But they are notoriously hard to anticipate, given the relatively small or incremental changes in variables such as atmospheric carbon concentrations that trigger them.