What do ecosystems, financial markets, and the climate have in common? They can all change in abrupt, irreversible, and unexpected ways.

Complex systems at the verge of collapse tend to exhibit a phenomenon called "critical slowing down'. In simple terms, this means that a system will take longer to return to its equilibrium after a disturbance if it is close to collapsing. Imagine for instance a degraded coral reef. The time it will take for the coral reef to recover after the hit of a hurricane will be longer when compared to the case of an undegraded reef.

in my thesis, I treat the idea of estimating the risk of abrupt, irreversible, and unexpected transitions across different systems taking advantage of the critical slowing down phenomenon that occurs prior to bifurcation points.

In the dance piece, the music is implying a change in some underlying condition that brings the dancers towards a critical point of collapse. Little is evident; the four dancers move around, influence each other in a way that conveys little of the fact that they are approaching a tipping point. A closer look however shows different. As the piece advances and the system is getting closer to the crash, one can see glimpses of slowing down. Small disturbances dissipate slower. The moves are lagging behind. Dancers start to appear slower and to correlate more with each other - the diminishing stability gets contagious. At the end the system collapses.