Is West-Antarctica’s Tipping Point a Fixed Value?
Talk, Europen Geoscience Union, Annual Meeting 2022, Vienna, Austria
The tipping point of a tipping element is often referring to its bifurcation point. For instance, publications mentioning the tipping point of the West-Antarctic Ice Sheet (Lenton et al. 2008, Armstrong McKay et al. 2022) refer to the level of regional warming at which a large scale collapse arises in quasi-equilibrium simulations. This however omits the role of the forcing rate, which can imply a collapse at lower levels of regional warming, as I show through various simualtions. This effect is commonly known as rate-induced tipping and needs to be assessed when talking about a tipping point which, to answer the question, cannot be understood as a single value (unlike a bifurcation point).