Agathe Verger

Contact

Email: Agathe.Verger@vuw.ac.nz
Office: CO508

Qualifications

MSc Chemical Engineering, France (2010)

Master in Business Administration, EUNCET Business School Barcelona (2021)

PhD thesis

Working Title

Antarctica as a Complex Dynamical System

Supervisors

• Prof. Nick Golledge
• Prof Tim Naish

Project objectives and description

The future of Antarctica is inherently tied to changes in global climate, oceans, and the biosphere. Human behaviours are adversely affecting both physical and ecological aspects of the global environment, and the associated impacts in turn reciprocally affect us, at scales from individual to global. This mutual dependence constitutes a feedback loop that has potential for either runaway behaviour, or self-regulation, depending on how it is managed.

This kind of reciprocal interaction has previously been explored within the context of planetary evolution, known as the Gaia Hypothesis (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974). This hypothesis suggests that interacting natural systems would tend towards a situation of mutual balance (‘homeostasis’), acting as a single, self-regulating organism. However, this hypothesis did not explicitly consider the destabilising role of human activity, and is not a sufficient framework to describe current climate dynamics.

This project will use an approach rooted in complex systems science, which aims to consider Antarctica as a complex dynamical system rather than a complicated deterministic system, and one in which it behaves like a living organism – a ‘heart beating’ - that interacts actively with its surrounding environment.

Most living organisms exhibit behaviours far from equilibrium in order to respond to external forcing and ensure their persistence. Feedback processes occur across a wide range of temporal and spatial scales, sometimes leading to scale-invariant (or ‘fractal’) properties that may reflect self-organization of a system.

This research project will explore a wide range of Antarctic datasets with the goal of identifying behaviours typical of complex dynamical systems. These may include:

- self-organization through fractal-like geometries as a signature of scale invariance patterns;

- abrupt changes and how they might be associated with tipping points,  thresholds, regime shifts and bifurcations;

- dynamical behaviours and associated regimes (chaotic/ periodic), and the potential existence of a strange attractor

Publications

TBC