Climate of the Past
Climate of the Past
CP
Articles | Volume 22, issue 1
Articles | Volume 22, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-22-17-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-22-17-2026
© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Articles | Volume 22, issue 1
Rapid communication
 | 
09 Jan 2026
Rapid communication |  | 09 Jan 2026

Rapid communication: Middle Pleistocene Transition as a phenomenon of orbitally enabled sensitivity to initial values

Mikhail Y. Verbitsky and Anne Willem Omta

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Cited articles

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Ashwin, P. and Ditlevsen, P. D.: The middle Pleistocene transition as a generic bifurcation on a slow manifold, Clim. Dynam., 45, 2683–2695, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2501-9, 2015. 
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Barker, S., Lisiecki, L. E., Knorr, G., Nuber, S., and Tzedakis, P. C.: Distinct roles for precession, obliquity, and eccentricity in Pleistocene 100-kyrglacial cycles. Science, 387, eadp3491, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adp3491, 2025. 
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The cause of the Middle Pleistocene Transition (MPT) period shift is generally thought to be a change within the Earth System, since the orbital insolation forcing does not change its pattern through the event. Here we propose that the MPT could be a dominant-period relaxation process that may be strongly dependent on the initial state of the system and this sensitivity to the initial state is enabled by the orbital forcing.
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