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Destabilization of Earth system tipping elements

Nature Geoscience volume 18, pages 949–960 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

There is rising concern that several parts of the Earth system may abruptly transition to alternative stable states in response to anthropogenic climate and land-use change. Key candidates of such tipping elements include the Greenland Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the South American monsoon system and the Amazon rainforest. Owing to the complex dynamics and feedbacks between them via oceanic and atmospheric coupling, the levels of anthropogenic forcing at which transitions to alternative states can be expected remain uncertain. Here we demonstrate how such interactions can generate spurious signals and potentially mask genuine signs of destabilization. We further review and present observation-based evidence that the stability of these four tipping elements has declined in recent decades, suggesting that they have moved towards their critical thresholds, which may be crossed within the range of unmitigated anthropogenic warming. Our results call for better monitoring of these tipping elements and for increased efforts to stop greenhouse gas emissions and land-use change.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of the four coupled tipping elements and comparison between coupled and independent tipping elements.
Fig. 2: Schematic illustrating false-positive EWS and how to reduce their probability.
Fig. 3: EWS for the central-western GrIS, AMOC, Amazon rainforest and SAMS.

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Data availability

All data presented in this work are publicly available. The analysis data used to generate the figures are available via GitHub at https://github.com/Tonny-liu/Four_tipping_elements.

Code availability

The Python code used to generate the figures is publicly available via GitHub at https://github.com/Tonny-liu/Four_tipping_elements.

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Acknowledgements

N. Boers and S.B. acknowledge funding by the Volkswagen Foundation. This is ClimTip contribution no. 12; the ClimTip project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101137601. This study received support from the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) Tipping Elements SIRENE project (contract no. 4000146954/24/I-LR). M.B.-Y. and N. Boers acknowledge funding by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 956170. T.L. acknowledges funding from the National Key R&D Program of China, no. 2023YFE0109000. The work was supported by the UiT Aurora Centre Program, UiT The Arctic University of Norway (2020) and the Research Council of Norway (project number 314570). C.A.B. and T.M.L. acknowledge funding from OptimESM, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101081193. T.S. acknowledges support from the DFG STRIVE project (SM 710/2-1).

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Niklas Boers, Teng Liu.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Earth System Modelling, School of Engineering and Design, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Niklas Boers, Teng Liu, Sebastian Bathiany, Maya Ben-Yami, Lana L. Blaschke & Andreas Morr

  2. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany

    Niklas Boers, Teng Liu, Sebastian Bathiany, Maya Ben-Yami, Lana L. Blaschke, Nils Bochow, Andreas Morr & Da Nian

  3. Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Niklas Boers, Chris A. Boulton & Timothy M. Lenton

  4. School of Systems Science and Institute of Nonequilibrium Systems, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Teng Liu

  5. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Science and Technology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Nils Bochow & Martin Rypdal

  6. Institute of Geosciences, Universität Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Taylor Smith

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Contributions

N. Boers conceived and designed the study. N. Boers and T.L. carried out the analyses with input from S.B., M.B.-Y., L.L.B., N. Bochow and A.M. All authors discussed and interpreted the results. N. Boers and T.L. wrote the paper with input from all authors.

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Boers, N., Liu, T., Bathiany, S. et al. Destabilization of Earth system tipping elements. Nat. Geosci. 18, 949–960 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01787-0

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