Century‐scale effect of climate change on meteorite falls
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Climate change is inducing a global atmospheric contraction above the tropopause (~10 km), leading to systematic decrease in neutral air density. The impact of climate change on small meteoroids has already been observed over the last two decades, with documented shifts in their ablation altitudes in the mesosphere (~50–85 km) and lower thermosphere (~85–120 km). This study evaluates the potential effect of these changes on meteorite‐dropping fireballs, which typically penetrate the stratosphere (~10–50 km). As a case study, we simulate the atmospheric entry of the fragile Winchcombe carbonaceous chondrite under projected atmospheric conditions for the year 2100 assuming a moderate future emission scenario. Using a semi‐empirical fragmentation and ablation model, we compare the meteoroid's light curve and deceleration under present and future atmospheric density profiles. The results indicate a modest variation of the ablation heights, with the catastrophic fragmentation occurring 300 m lower and the luminous flight terminating 190 m higher. The absolute magnitude peak remains unchanged, but the fireball would appear 0.5 dimmer above ~120 km. The surviving meteorite mass is reduced by only 0.1 g. Our findings indicate that century‐scale variations in atmospheric density caused by climate change moderately influence bright fireballs and have a minimal impact on meteorite survival.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".