An abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to transition at a rate that is determined by the climate system energy-balance, and which is more rapid than the rate of change of the external forcing, though it may include sudden forcing events such as meteorite impacts. Abrupt climate change therefore is a variation beyond the variability of a climate. Past events include the end of the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse,

Younger Dryas The Younger Dryas (c. 12,900 to 11,700 years BP) was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, c. 27,000 to 20,000 years BP). The Younger Dryas was the last stage ...

Heinrich event A Heinrich event is a natural phenomenon in which large groups of icebergs break off from glaciers and traverse the North Atlantic. First described by marine geologist Hartmut Heinrich (Heinrich, H., 1988), they occurred during five of the last s ...

s and possibly also the

Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum The Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum (PETM), alternatively (ETM1), and formerly known as the "Initial Eocene" or "", was a time period with a more than 5–8 °C global average temperature rise across the event. This climate event o ...

. The term is also used within the context of

climate change In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...

to describe sudden climate change that is detectable over the time-scale of a human lifetime, possibly as the result of feedback loops within the climate system or tipping points. Timescales of events described as 'abrupt' may vary dramatically. Changes recorded in the climate of Greenland at the end of the Younger Dryas, as measured by ice-cores, imply a sudden warming of + within a timescale of a few years. Other abrupt changes are the + on Greenland 11,270 years ago or the abrupt + warming 22,000 years ago on

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest contine ...

. By contrast, the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum may have initiated anywhere between a few decades and several thousand years. Finally, Earth System's models project that under ongoing

greenhouse gas emissions Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities strengthen the greenhouse effect, contributing to climate change. Most is carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. The largest emitters include coal in China and lar ...

as early as 2047, the Earth's near surface temperature could depart from the range of variability in the last 150 years, affecting over 3 billion people and most places of great species diversity on Earth.

Definitions

According to the Committee on Abrupt Climate Change of the

National Research Council National Research Council may refer to: * National Research Council (Canada), sponsoring research and development * National Research Council (Italy), scientific and technological research, Rome * National Research Council (United States), part of ...

There are essentially two definitions of abrupt climate change: *In terms of physics, it is a ''transition of the climate system into a different mode on a time scale that is faster than the responsible forcing''. *In terms of impacts, ''"an abrupt change is one that takes place so rapidly and unexpectedly that human or natural systems have difficulty adapting to it"''. These definitions are complementary: the former gives some insight into how abrupt climate change comes about; the latter explains why there is so much research devoted to it.

General

Possible tipping elements in the climate system include regional

effects of climate change The effects of climate change impact the physical environment, ecosystems and human societies. The environmental effects of climate change are broad and far-reaching. They affect the water cycle, oceans, sea and land ice (glaciers), sea level ...

, some of which had abrupt onset and may therefore be regarded as abrupt climate change. Scientists have stated, "Our synthesis of present knowledge suggests that a variety of tipping elements could reach their critical point within this century under anthropogenic climate change". It has been postulated that teleconnections, oceanic and atmospheric processes, on different timescales, connect both hemispheres during abrupt climate change. The IPCC states that global warming "could lead to some effects that are abrupt or irreversible". A 2013 report from the U.S.

called for attention to the abrupt impacts of climate change, stating that even steady, gradual change in the physical climate system can have abrupt impacts elsewhere, such as in human infrastructure and ecosystems if critical thresholds are crossed. The report emphasizes the need for an early warning system that could help society better anticipate sudden changes and emerging impacts. A characteristic of the abrupt climate change impacts is that they occur at a rate that is faster than anticipated. This element makes ecosystems that are immobile and limited in their capacity to respond to abrupt changes, such as forestry ecosystems, particularly vulnerable. Scientific understanding of abrupt climate change is generally poor. The probability of abrupt change for some climate related feedbacks may be low. Factors that may increase the probability of abrupt climate change include higher magnitudes of global warming, warming that occurs more rapidly and warming that is sustained over longer time periods.

Climate models

Climate models are currently unable to predict abrupt climate change events, or most of the past abrupt climate shifts. A potential abrupt feedback due to

thermokarst Thermokarst is a type of terrain characterised by very irregular surfaces of marshy hollows and small hummocks formed as ice-rich permafrost thaws. The land surface type occurs in Arctic areas, and on a smaller scale in mountainous areas such as ...

lake formations in the Arctic, in response to thawing

permafrost Permafrost is ground that continuously remains below 0 °C (32 °F) for two or more years, located on land or under the ocean. Most common in the Northern Hemisphere, around 15% of the Northern Hemisphere or 11% of the global surface ...

soils, releasing additional greenhouse gas methane, is currently not accounted for in climate models.

Possible precursor

Most abrupt climate shifts are likely due to sudden circulation shifts, analogous to a flood cutting a new river channel. The best-known examples are the several dozen shutdowns of the North Atlantic Ocean's Meridional Overturning Circulation during the last

ice age An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and gree ...

, affecting climate worldwide. *The current warming of the Arctic, the duration of the summer season, is considered abrupt and massive. *Antarctic ozone depletion caused significant atmospheric circulation changes. *There have also been two occasions when the Atlantic's Meridional Overturning Circulation lost a crucial safety factor. The

Greenland Sea The Greenland Sea is a body of water that borders Greenland to the west, the Svalbard archipelago to the east, Fram Strait and the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Norwegian Sea and Iceland to the south. The Greenland Sea is often defined as p ...

flushing at 75 °N shut down in 1978, recovering over the next decade. Then the second-largest flushing site, the

Labrador Sea The Labrador Sea (French: ''mer du Labrador'', Danish: ''Labradorhavet'') is an arm of the North Atlantic Ocean between the Labrador Peninsula and Greenland. The sea is flanked by continental shelf, continental shelves to the southwest, northwest, ...

, shut down in 1997 for ten years. While shutdowns overlapping in time have not been seen during the 50 years of observation, previous total shutdowns had severe worldwide climate consequences.

Effects

Abrupt climate change has likely been the cause of wide-ranging and severe effects: * Mass extinctions in the past, most notably the

Permian–Triassic extinction event The Permian–Triassic (P–T, P–Tr) extinction event, also known as the Latest Permian extinction event, the End-Permian Extinction and colloquially as the Great Dying, formed the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as ...

(often referred colloquially to as the Great Dying) and the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse, have been suggested as a consequence of abrupt climate change. * Loss of biodiversity: without interference from abrupt climate change and other extinction events, the biodiversity of Earth would continue to grow. * Changes in ocean circulation such as: :* Increasing frequency of El Niño events :* Potential disruption to the thermohaline circulation, such as that which may have occurred during the

event. :* Changes to the

North Atlantic oscillation The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is a weather phenomenon over the North Atlantic Ocean of fluctuations in the difference of atmospheric pressure at sea level (SLP) between the Icelandic Low and the Azores High. Through fluctuations in the ...

:* Changes in Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) which could contribute to more severe weather events.

Climate feedback effects

One source of abrupt climate change effects is a

feedback Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop. The system can then be said to ''feed back'' into itself. The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handled ...

process, in which a warming event causes a change that adds to further warming. The same can apply to cooling. Examples of such feedback processes are: *

Ice–albedo feedback Ice–albedo feedback is a positive feedback climate process where a change in the area of ice caps, glaciers, and sea ice alters the albedo and surface temperature of a planet. Ice is very reflective, therefore it reflects far more solar energy ba ...

in which the advance or retreat of ice cover alters the

albedo Albedo (; ) is the measure of the diffuse reflection of sunlight, solar radiation out of the total solar radiation and measured on a scale from 0, corresponding to a black body that absorbs all incident radiation, to 1, corresponding to a body ...

("whiteness") of the earth and its ability to absorb the sun's energy. *

Soil carbon feedback The soil carbon feedback concerns the releases of carbon from soils in response to global warming. This response under climate change is a positive climate feedback. There is approximately two to three times more carbon in global soils than the Ea ...

is the release of carbon from soils in response to global warming. * The dying and the burning of forests by

global warming In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...

Volcanism

Isostatic rebound in response to glacier retreat (unloading) and increased local salinity have been attributed to increased volcanic activity at the onset of the abrupt Bølling-Allerød warming. They are associated with the interval of intense volcanic activity, hinting at an interaction between climate and volcanism: enhanced short-term melting of glaciers, possibly via albedo changes from particle fallout on glacier surfaces.

Past events

Several periods of abrupt climate change have been identified in the

paleoclimatic Paleoclimatology (British spelling, palaeoclimatology) is the study of climates for which direct measurements were not taken. As instrumental records only span a tiny part of Earth's history, the reconstruction of ancient climate is important to ...

record. Notable examples include: * About 25 climate shifts, called Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, which have been identified in the

ice core An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet or a high mountain glacier. Since the ice forms from the incremental buildup of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper ones, and an ice core contains ic ...

record during the glacial period over the past 100,000 years. * The

event, notably its sudden end. It is the most recent of the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and began 12,900 years ago and moved back into a warm-and-wet climate regime about 11,600 years ago. It has been suggested that "the extreme rapidity of these changes in a variable that directly represents regional climate implies that the events at the end of the last glaciation may have been responses to some kind of threshold or trigger in the North Atlantic climate system." A model for this event based on disruption to the thermohaline circulation has been supported by other studies. * The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, timed at 55 million years ago, which may have been caused by the release of methane clathrates, although potential alternative mechanisms have been identified. This was associated with rapid

ocean acidification Ocean acidification is the reduction in the pH value of the Earth’s ocean. Between 1751 and 2021, the average pH value of the ocean surface has decreased from approximately 8.25 to 8.14. The root cause of ocean acidification is carbon dioxid ...

* The Permian–Triassic Extinction Event, in which up to 95% of all species became extinct, has been hypothesized to be related to a rapid change in global climate. Life on land took 30 million years to recover. * The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse occurred 300 million years ago, at which time tropical rainforests were devastated by climate change. The cooler, drier climate had a severe effect on the biodiversity of amphibians, the primary form of vertebrate life on land. There are also abrupt climate changes associated with the catastrophic draining of glacial lakes. One example of this is the

8.2-kiloyear event In climatology, the so-called "8.2-kiloyear event" was a Abrupt climate change, sudden decrease in global temperatures that occurred approximately 8,200 years before the present (Before Present, BP), that is, 6,251 Common Era, BC. It defines the ...

, which is associated with the draining of

Glacial Lake Agassiz Lake Agassiz was a large glacial lake in central North America. Fed by glacial meltwater at the end of the last glacial period, its area was larger than all of the modern Great Lakes combined. First postulated in 1823 by William H. Keating, i ...

. Another example is the

Antarctic Cold Reversal The Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR) was an important episode of cooling in the climate history of the Earth during the deglaciation at the close of the last ice age. It illustrates the complexity of the climate changes at the transition from the Plei ...

, c. 14,500 years before present ( BP), which is believed to have been caused by a meltwater pulse probably from either the

Antarctic ice sheet The Antarctic ice sheet is one of the two polar ice caps of Earth. It covers about 98% of the Antarctic continent and is the largest single mass of ice on Earth, with an average thickness of over 2 kilometers. It covers an area of almost and ...

or the

Laurentide Ice Sheet The Laurentide Ice Sheet was a massive sheet of ice that covered millions of square miles, including most of Canada and a large portion of the Northern United States, multiple times during the Quaternary glacial epochs, from 2.58 million years a ...

. These rapid meltwater release events have been hypothesized as a cause for Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, A 2017 study concluded that similar conditions to today's

Antarctic ozone hole Ozone depletion consists of two related events observed since the late 1970s: a steady lowering of about four percent in the total amount of ozone in Earth's atmosphere, and a much larger springtime decrease in stratospheric ozone (the ozone lay ...

(atmospheric circulation and hydroclimate changes), ~17,700 years ago, when stratospheric ozone depletion contributed to abrupt accelerated Southern Hemisphere

deglaciation Deglaciation is the transition from full glacial conditions during ice ages, to warm interglacials, characterized by global warming and sea level rise due to change in continental ice volume. Thus, it refers to the retreat of a glacier, an ice shee ...

. The event coincidentally happened with an estimated 192-year series of massive volcanic eruptions, attributed to

Mount Takahe Mount Takahe is a snow-covered shield volcano in Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica, from the Amundsen Sea. It is a mountain with parasitic vents and a caldera up to wide. Most of the volcano is formed by trachytic lava flows, but hyaloclastite ...

West Antarctica West Antarctica, or Lesser Antarctica, one of the two major regions of Antarctica, is the part of that continent that lies within the Western Hemisphere, and includes the Antarctic Peninsula. It is separated from East Antarctica by the Transant ...