Have you ever played Jenga? It’s a fun game, but it can also teach us something important about our planet!
In Jenga, players take out wooden blocks from a tall tower, one by one, until the tower falls. The last block that makes the tower fall is called a “tipping element.” This means that before you took out that block, the tower was still standing. But as soon as you removed it, the tower crashed down.
Something similar can happen in nature. There are things called “tipping elements” that can cause big and sometimes harmful changes to our planet. For example, think about the Antarctic ice sheets, which are huge pieces of ice near the South Pole, far south of Tasmania. If the temperature rises too much, these ice sheets can melt. If that happens, the animals that live there could lose their homes and might disappear forever.
Fortunately, we can use a little bit of maths to understand tipping elements. The research I do is all about using maths to understand different aspects of “tipping elements”.
