Abrupt Climate Change and Multistability of the Thermohaline Circulation

• Main Author: Richard W. Turner
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: ice core
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.575.4921; http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/~nigel/courses/569/Essays_Fall2008/files/turner.pdf

Ice core records suggest that the Earth’s climate has undergone rapid, catas-trophic shifts on multiple occasions in geologically recent times. The multiplic-ity of steady states found in fluid convection models has led many to speculate that the changes may have been caused by transitions between different stable modes of ocean current patterns. This paper reviews analytical and numerical modeling of multistability in the thermohaline circulation with particular ref-erence to bifurcation analysis. The relevance of these models to paleoclimate data and contemporary observations is discussed. 1 1 Introduction: Challenges