SDS Colloquium, Speaker Ivan Sudakow

The Earth’s climate contains “tipping elements” such as summer Arctic sea ice and permafrost, where gradual forcing can trigger abrupt and potentially irreversible change. Arctic sea-ice loss is proceeding far faster than most climate-model projections, while permafrost thaw may release large but uncertain fluxes of greenhouse gases. These critical transitions raise mathematical questions about stability, early warning, and predictability in high-dimensional, noisy systems. In this talk I will show how tools from stochastic modeling, statistics, and statistical physics—ranging from lattice spin-type models of Arctic sea ice geometry to reduced-order stochastic models of polar climate—can be combined with observations to constrain the likelihood of tipping events.