A punctuated equilibrium analysis of the climate evolution of cenozoic exhibits a hierarchy of abrupt transitions

Abstract

The Earth’s climate has experienced numerous critical transitions during its history, which have often been accompanied by massive and rapid changes in the biosphere. Such transitions are evidenced in various proxy records covering different timescales. The goal is then to identify, date, characterize, and rank past critical transitions in terms of importance, thus possibly yielding a more thorough perspective on climatic history. To illustrate such an approach, which is inspired by the punctuated equilibrium perspective on the theory of evolution, we have analyzed 2 key high-resolution datasets: the CENOGRID marine compilation (past 66 Myr), and North Atlantic U1308 record (past 3.3 Myr). By combining recurrence analysis of the individual time series with a multivariate representation of the system based on the theory of the quasi-potential, we identify the key abrupt transitions associated with major regime changes that separate various clusters of climate variability. This allows interpreting the time-evolution of the system as a trajectory taking place in a dynamical landscape, whose multiscale features describe a hierarchy of metastable states and associated tipping points.

Alternative climatic steady states for the Permian-Triassic paleogeography

“…Thus, a better understanding of these tipping mechanisms becomes essential through, for example, the study of the evolution of the Earth climate in the past (Wunderling et al, 2023). Signatures of global climatic transitions are indeed found in paleoclimate proxy records for several periods of Earth's history (Messori and Faranda, 2021;Boers et al, 2022), as during the Snowball Earth episodes in the Neoproterozoic era (Hoffman et al, 1998;Pierrehumbert, 2005;Hoffman et al, 2017;Eberhard et al, 2023), the Eocene-Oligocene transition (Hutchinson et al, 2021), the glacial-interglacial cycles (Ferreira et al, 2018;Riechers et al, 2022), the whole Cenozoic, from 66 Ma to present (Westerhold et al, 2020;Rousseau et al, 2023), or the climatic oscillations observed at the Smithian-Spathian boundary in the Early Triassic (Widmann et al, 2020), just after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction (∼ 252 Ma), the most severe of the Phanerozoic (Raup, 1979;MacLeod, 2014;Stanley, 2016). However, our knowledge of deep-time climates is subject to large uncertainties and their numerical modelling needs to consider, in general, a wide range of initial and boundary conditions.…”

Steady states and bifurcation diagram for the Permian-Triassic paleogeography

“…Thus, a better understanding of these tipping mechanisms becomes essential through, for example, the study of the evolution of Earth's climate in the past (Wunderling et al 2023). Signatures of global climatic transitions are indeed found in paleoclimate proxy records for several periods of Earth's history (Messori and Faranda 2021;Boers et al 2022), such as during the Snowball Earth episodes in the Neoproterozoic era (Hoffman et al 1998;Pierrehumbert 2005;Hoffman et al 2017;Eberhard et al 2023), the Eocene-Oligocene transition (Hutchinson et al 2021), the glacialinterglacial cycles (Ferreira et al 2018;Riechers et al 2022), and the whole Cenozoic, from 66 Ma to present (Westerhold et al 2020;Rousseau et al 2023).…”