TY - GEN A1 - Emberson, Robert A1 - Hovius, Niels A1 - Galy, Albert A1 - Marc, Odin T1 - Oxidation of sulfides and rapid weathering in recent landslides T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Linking together the processes of rapid physical erosion and the resultant chemical dissolution of rock is a crucial step in building an overall deterministic understanding of weathering in mountain belts. Landslides, which are the most volumetrically important geomorphic process at these high rates of erosion, can generate extremely high rates of very localised weathering. To elucidate how this process works we have taken advantage of uniquely intense landsliding, resulting from Typhoon Morakot, in the T'aimali River and surrounds in southern Taiwan. Combining detailed analysis of landslide seepage chemistry with estimates of catchment-by-catchment landslide volumes, we demonstrate that in this setting the primary role of landslides is to introduce fresh, highly labile mineral phases into the surface weathering environment. There, rapid weathering is driven by the oxidation of pyrite and the resultant sulfuric-acid-driven dissolution of primarily carbonate rock. The total dissolved load correlates well with dissolved sulfate - the chief product of this style of weathering - in both landslides and streams draining the area (R-2 = 0.841 and 0.929 respectively; p < 0.001 in both cases), with solute chemistry in seepage from landslides and catchments affected by significant landsliding governed by the same weathering reactions. The predominance of coupled carbonate-sulfuric-acid-driven weathering is the key difference between these sites and previously studied landslides in New Zealand (Emberson et al., 2016), but in both settings increasing volumes of landslides drive greater overall solute concentrations in streams. Bedrock landslides, by excavating deep below saprolite-rock interfaces, create conditions for weathering in which all mineral phases in a lithology are initially unweathered within landslide deposits. As a result, the most labile phases dominate the weathering immediately after mobilisation and during a transient period of depletion. This mode of dissolution can strongly alter the overall output of solutes from catchments and their contribution to global chemical cycles if landslide-derived material is retained in catchments for extended periods after mass wasting. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 553 KW - physical erosion KW - Mountain Belt KW - Southwestern Taiwan KW - athmospheric CO2 KW - New-Zealand KW - climatic controls KW - Himalayan Rivers KW - Southern Alps KW - carbon-cycle KW - model Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-412326 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 553 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Prahl, Boris F. A1 - Rybski, Diego A1 - Boettle, Markus A1 - Kropp, Jürgen T1 - Damage functions for climate-related hazards BT - unification and uncertainty analysis T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Most climate change impacts manifest in the form of natural hazards. Damage assessment typically relies on damage functions that translate the magnitude of extreme events to a quantifiable damage. In practice, the availability of damage functions is limited due to a lack of data sources and a lack of understanding of damage processes. The study of the characteristics of damage functions for different hazards could strengthen the theoretical foundation of damage functions and support their development and validation. Accordingly, we investigate analogies of damage functions for coastal flooding and for wind storms and identify a unified approach. This approach has general applicability for granular portfolios and may also be applied, for example, to heat-related mortality. Moreover, the unification enables the transfer of methodology between hazards and a consistent treatment of uncertainty. This is demonstrated by a sensitivity analysis on the basis of two simple case studies (for coastal flood and storm damage). The analysis reveals the relevance of the various uncertainty sources at varying hazard magnitude and on both the microscale and the macroscale level. Main findings are the dominance of uncertainty from the hazard magnitude and the persistent behaviour of intrinsic uncertainties on both scale levels. Our results shed light on the general role of uncertainties and provide useful insight for the application of the unified approach. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 534 KW - coastal flood damage KW - sea-level rise KW - of-the-art KW - sensitivity-analysis KW - natural hazards KW - storm damage KW - model KW - wind KW - vulnerability KW - buildings Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-410184 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 534 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Frieler, Katja A1 - Mengel, Matthias A1 - Levermann, Anders T1 - Delaying future sea-level rise by storing water in Antarctica T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Even if greenhouse gas emissions were stopped today, sea level would continue to rise for centuries, with the long-term sea-level commitment of a 2 degrees C warmer world significantly exceeding 2 m. In view of the potential implications for coastal populations and ecosystems worldwide, we investigate, from an ice-dynamic perspective, the possibility of delaying sea-level rise by pumping ocean water onto the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet. We find that due to wave propagation ice is discharged much faster back into the ocean than would be expected from a pure advection with surface velocities. The delay time depends strongly on the distance from the coastline at which the additional mass is placed and less strongly on the rate of sea-level rise that is mitigated. A millennium-scale storage of at least 80% of the additional ice requires placing it at a distance of at least 700 km from the coastline. The pumping energy required to elevate the potential energy of ocean water to mitigate the currently observed 3 mmyr(-1) will exceed 7% of the current global primary energy supply. At the same time, the approach offers a comprehensive protection for entire coastlines particularly including regions that cannot be protected by dikes. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 533 KW - carbon-dioxide emissions KW - ice-sheet KW - climate-change KW - model KW - collapse KW - commitment KW - Greenland KW - discharge KW - project KW - surface Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-410234 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 533 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Levermann, Anders A1 - Winkelmann, Ricarda T1 - A simple equation for the melt elevation feedback of ice sheets T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - In recent decades, the Greenland Ice Sheet has been losing mass and has thereby contributed to global sea-level rise. The rate of ice loss is highly relevant for coastal protection worldwide. The ice loss is likely to increase under future warming. Beyond a critical temperature threshold, a meltdown of the Greenland Ice Sheet is induced by the self-enforcing feedback between its lowering surface elevation and its increasing surface mass loss: the more ice that is lost, the lower the ice surface and the warmer the surface air temperature, which fosters further melting and ice loss. The computation of this rate so far relies on complex numerical models which are the appropriate tools for capturing the complexity of the problem. By contrast we aim here at gaining a conceptual understanding by deriving a purposefully simple equation for the self-enforcing feedback which is then used to estimate the melt time for different levels of warming using three observable characteristics of the ice sheet itself and its surroundings. The analysis is purely conceptual in nature. It is missing important processes like ice dynamics for it to be useful for applications to sea-level rise on centennial timescales, but if the volume loss is dominated by the feedback, the resulting logarithmic equation unifies existing numerical simulations and shows that the melt time depends strongly on the level of warming with a critical slow-down near the threshold: the median time to lose 10% of the present-day ice volume varies between about 3500 years for a temperature level of 0.5 degrees C above the threshold and 500 years for 5 degrees C. Unless future observations show a significantly higher melting sensitivity than currently observed, a complete meltdown is unlikely within the next 2000 years without significant ice-dynamical contributions. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 529 KW - sea-level rise KW - mass-balance KW - climate-change KW - Greenland KW - model KW - glacier KW - projections KW - dynamics KW - impact KW - 21st-Century Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-409834 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 529 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Wickert, Andrew D. T1 - Open-source modular solutions for flexural isostasy BT - gFlex v1.0 T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Isostasy is one of the oldest and most widely applied concepts in the geosciences, but the geoscientific community lacks a coherent, easy-to-use tool to simulate flexure of a realistic (i.e., laterally heterogeneous) lithosphere under an arbitrary set of surface loads. Such a model is needed for studies of mountain building, sedimentary basin formation, glaciation, sea-level change, and other tectonic, geodynamic, and surface processes. Here I present gFlex (for GNU flexure), an open-source model that can produce analytical and finite difference solutions for lithospheric flexure in one (profile) and two (map view) dimensions. To simulate the flexural isostatic response to an imposed load, it can be used by itself or within GRASS GIS for better integration with field data. gFlex is also a component with the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS) and Landlab modeling frameworks for coupling with a wide range of Earth-surface-related models, and can be coupled to additional models within Python scripts. As an example of this in-script coupling, I simulate the effects of spatially variable lithospheric thickness on a modeled Iceland ice cap. Finite difference solutions in gFlex can use any of five types of boundary conditions: 0-displacement, 0-slope (i.e., clamped); 0-slope, 0-shear; 0-moment, 0-shear (i.e., broken plate); mirror symmetry; and periodic. Typical calculations with gFlex require << 1 s to similar to 1 min on a personal laptop computer. These characteristics - multiple ways to run the model, multiple solution methods, multiple boundary conditions, and short compute time - make gFlex an effective tool for flexural isostatic modeling across the geosciences. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 498 KW - EFFECTIVE ELASTIC THICKNESS KW - postglacial sea-level KW - oceanic lithospere KW - ice-sheet KW - spatial variations KW - gravity-anomalies KW - mountain-ranges KW - Lake Bonneville KW - heat-flow KW - model Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-408366 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 498 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Schleussner, Carl-Friedrich A1 - Lissner, Tabea Katharina A1 - Fischer, Erich M. A1 - Wohland, Jan A1 - Perrette, Mahé A1 - Golly, Antonius A1 - Rogelj, Joeri A1 - Childers, Katelin A1 - Schewe, Jacob A1 - Frieler, Katja A1 - Mengel, Matthias A1 - Hare, William A1 - Schaeffer, Michiel T1 - Differential climate impacts for policy-relevant limits to global warming BT - the case of 1.5 °C and 2 °C T2 - Earth System Dynamics N2 - Robust appraisals of climate impacts at different levels of global-mean temperature increase are vital to guide assessments of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. The 2015 Paris Agreement includes a two-headed temperature goal: "holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C". Despite the prominence of these two temperature limits, a comprehensive overview of the differences in climate impacts at these levels is still missing. Here we provide an assessment of key impacts of climate change at warming levels of 1.5 degrees C and 2 degrees C, including extreme weather events, water availability, agricultural yields, sea-level rise and risk of coral reef loss. Our results reveal substantial differences in impacts between a 1.5 degrees C and 2 degrees C warming that are highly relevant for the assessment of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. For heat-related extremes, the additional 0.5 degrees C increase in global-mean temperature marks the difference between events at the upper limit of present-day natural variability and a new climate regime, particularly in tropical regions. Similarly, this warming difference is likely to be decisive for the future of tropical coral reefs. In a scenario with an end-of-century warming of 2 degrees C, virtually all tropical coral reefs are projected to be at risk of severe degradation due to temperature-induced bleaching from 2050 onwards. This fraction is reduced to about 90% in 2050 and projected to decline to 70% by 2100 for a 1.5 degrees C scenario. Analyses of precipitation-related impacts reveal distinct regional differences and hot-spots of change emerge. Regional reduction in median water availability for the Mediterranean is found to nearly double from 9% to 17% between 1.5 degrees C and 2 degrees C, and the projected lengthening of regional dry spells increases from 7 to 11%. Projections for agricultural yields differ between crop types as well as world regions. While some (in particular high-latitude) regions may benefit, tropical regions like West Africa, South-East Asia, as well as Central and northern South America are projected to face substantial local yield reductions, particularly for wheat and maize. Best estimate sea-level rise projections based on two illustrative scenarios indicate a 50cm rise by 2100 relative to year 2000-levels for a 2 degrees C scenario, and about 10 cm lower levels for a 1.5 degrees C scenario. In a 1.5 degrees C scenario, the rate of sea-level rise in 2100 would be reduced by about 30% compared to a 2 degrees C scenario. Our findings highlight the importance of regional differentiation to assess both future climate risks and different vulnerabilities to incremental increases in global-mean temperature. The article provides a consistent and comprehensive assessment of existing projections and a good basis for future work on refining our understanding of the difference between impacts at 1.5 degrees C and 2 degrees C warming. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 426 KW - sea-level rise KW - Greenland ice-sheet KW - coral-reefs KW - precipitation extremes KW - West Antarctica KW - pine Island KW - model KW - projections KW - temperature KW - scenarios Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-410258 ER -