The UK is building an alarm system for climate tipping points

The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) will announce today that it’s seeking proposals to work on systems for two related climate tipping points. One is the accelerating melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which could raise sea levels dramatically. The other is the weakening of the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre, a huge current rotating counterclockwise south of Greenland that may have played a role in triggering the Little Ice Age around the 14th century. 

The goal of the five-year program will be to reduce scientific uncertainty about when these events could occur, how they would affect the planet and the species on it, and over what period those effects might develop and persist. In the end, ARIA hopes to deliver a proof of concept demonstrating that early warning systems can be “affordable, sustainable, and justified.” No such dedicated system exists today, though there’s considerable research being done to better understand the likelihood and consequences of surpassing these and other climate tipping points.

Sarah Bohndiek, a program director for the tipping points research program, says we underappreciate the possibility that crossing these points could significantly accelerate the effects of climate change and increase the dangers, possibly within the next few decades.

By developing an early warning system, “we might be able to change the way that we think about climate change and think about our preparedness for it,” says Bohndiek, a professor of biomedical physics at the University of Cambridge. 

ARIA intends to support teams that will work toward three goals: developing low-cost sensors that can withstand harsh environments and provide more precise and needed data about the conditions of these systems; deploying those and other sensing technologies to create “an observational network to monitor these tipping systems”; and building computer models that harness the laws of physics and artificial intelligence to pick up “subtle early warning signs of tipping” in the data.

But observers stress that designing precise early warning systems for either system would be no simple feat and might not be possible anytime soon. Not only do scientists have limited understanding of these systems, but the data  on how they’ve behaved in the past is patchy and noisy, and setting up extensive monitoring tools in these environments is expensive and cumbersome. 

Still, there’s wide agreement that we need to better understand these systems and the risks that the world may face.

Unlocking breakthroughs

It is clear that the tipping of either of these systems could have huge effects on Earth and its inhabitants.

As the world warmed in recent decades, trillions of tons of ice melted off the Greenland Ice Sheet, pouring fresh water into the North Atlantic, pushing up ocean levels, and reducing the amount of heat that the snow and ice reflected back into space.