Dynamic emergence of domino effects in systems of interacting tipping elements in ecology and climate

In ecology, climate and other fields, systems have been identified that can transition into a qualitatively different state when a critical threshold or tipping point in a driving process is crossed. An understanding of those tipping elements is of great interest given the increasing influence of humans on the biophysical Earth system. Tipping elements are not independent from each other as there exist complex interactions, e.g. through physical mechanisms that connect subsystems of the climate system. Based on earlier work on such coupled nonlinear systems, we systematically assessed the qualitative asymptotic behavior of interacting tipping elements. We developed an understanding of the consequences of interactions on the tipping behavior allowing for domino effects and tipping cascades to emerge under certain conditions. The application of these qualitative results to real-world examples of interacting tipping elements shows that domino effects with profound consequences can occur: the interacting Greenland ice sheet and thermohaline ocean circulation might tip before the tipping points of the isolated subsystems are crossed. The eutrophication of the first lake in a lake chain might propagate through the following lakes without a crossing of their individual critical nutrient input levels. The possibility of emerging domino effects calls for the development of a unified theory of interacting tipping elements and the quantitative analysis of interacting real-world tipping elements.

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