Quaternary climatic fluctuations as a consequence of self-organized criticality

B Grieger

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 1992, vol. 191, issue 1, 51-56

Abstract: It has long been known that the earth has gone through several colder climatic periods — the so-called ice ages — during the late Quaternary. In spite of various hypothesis about the cause of the growth and decay of the ice sheets, there is still no quantitative explanation for the full range of climatic variation. In this paper it is demonstrated that the concept of self-organized criticality due to Bak et al. (1987, 1988) offers a simple and appealing possibility to explain the power law background spectrum of the Quaternary ice volume fluctuations. We present a simple cellular automation which is able to reproduce almost the whole spectrum of Quaternary glaciation variability. The surprising confirmity of the very coarse model and the data suggests that the continental ice sheets — like the model — are in the self-organized critical state. This is confirmed by results obtained with a global ice model.

Date: 1992
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/037843719290505K
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:191:y:1992:i:1:p:51-56

DOI: 10.1016/0378-4371(92)90505-K

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().