The evasion of tipping: pattern formation near a Turing-fold bifurcation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spatial patterns formed near a Turing-fold bifurcation can enable ecosystems to avoid catastrophic tipping points, providing explicit criteria and demonstrating complex behaviors through mathematical modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of co-dimension 2 Turing-fold bifurcations in phase-field models, deriving explicit conditions for pattern formation to prevent tipping in ecosystems.

Findings

A critical parameter $eta$ determines tipping evasion when positive.

Explicit formulas for $eta$ enable prediction of system behavior.

Rich dynamics including stable patterns and chaos-like behavior are observed.

Abstract

Model studies indicate that many climate subsystems, especially ecosystems, may be vulnerable to 'tipping': a 'catastrophic process' in which a system, driven by gradually changing external factors, abruptly transitions (or 'collapses') from a preferred state to a less desirable one. In ecosystems, the emergence of spatial patterns has traditionally been interpreted as a possible 'early warning signal' for tipping. More recently, however, pattern formation has been proposed to serve a fundamentally different role: as a mechanism through which an (eco)system may 'evade tipping' by forming stable patterns that persist beyond the tipping point. Mathematically, tipping is typically associated with a saddle-node bifurcation, while pattern formation is normally driven by a Turing bifurcation. Therefore, we study the co-dimension 2 Turing-fold bifurcation and investigate the question: 'When can patterns initiated by the Turing bifurcation enable a system to evade tipping?' We develop our approach for a class of phase-field models and subsequently apply it to $n$-component reaction-diffusion systems -- a class of PDEs often used in ecosystem modeling. We demonstrate that a two-component system of modulation equations governs pattern formation near a Turing-fold bifurcation, and that tipping will be evaded when a critical parameter, $\beta$, is positive. We derive explicit expressions for $\beta$, allowing one to determine whether a given system may evade tipping. Moreover, we show numerically that this system exhibits rich behavior, ranging from stable, stationary, spatially quasi-periodic patterns to irregular, spatio-temporal, chaos-like dynamics.