Back to EGU abstract and presentation

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Addendum: After this presentation was submitted, a ground-breaking paper by a group at the University of Paris came on-line. Their paper, “On the Shoulders of Laplace” covers much the same ground as the EGU presentation linked above.

• F. Lopes, J.L. Le Mouël, V. Courtillot, D. Gibert, On the shoulders of Laplace,
  Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, 2021, 106693, ISSN 0031-9201, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pepi.2021.106693.

Their main thesis is that Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1799 correctly theorized that the wobble in the Earth’s rotation is due to the moon and sun, described in the treatise “Traité de Mécanique Céleste (Treatise of Celestial Mechanics)“.

Moreover Lopes et al claim that this celestial gravitational forcing carries over to controlling cyclic climate indices, following Laplace’s mathematical formulation (now known as Laplace’s Tidal Equations) for describing oceanic tides.

This view also aligns with the way we model climate indices such as ENSO and QBO via a solution to Laplace’s Tidal Equations, as described in the linked EGU presentation above.

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