OUR planet is balancing on a knife edge. Even small, random events such as
surging glaciers or sudden floods can trigger fundamental changes in the Earth’s
climate— provided they happen at the right moment.
Several times during the last ice age our planet warmed by up to 10 °C in
little more than a decade. Typically these sudden warmings, known as
Dansgaard-Oeschger events, happen every 1500 years, but sometimes they miss one
or two beats, reappearing after 3000 or 4500 years.
Andrey Ganopolski and Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate
Impact Research in Germany developed a computer model…
