Dissipation at the core-mantle boundary on a small-scale topography

International audienceThe parameters of the nutations are now known with a good accuracy, and the theory accounts for most of their values. Dissipative friction at the core-mantle boundary (CMB) and at the inner core boundary is an important ingredient of the theory. Up to now, viscous coupling at a smooth interface and electromagnetic coupling have been considered. In some cases they appear hardly strong enough to account for the observations. We advocate here that the CMB has a small-scale roughness and estimate the dissipation resulting from the interaction of the fluid core motion with this topography. We conclude that it might be significant

A living forest of Tibetan Juniper trees as a new kind of astronomical and geophysical observatory

The trajectory of Earth about the Sun is perturbed by torques exerted by the Moon and Sun, and also the four giant planets. These provoke variations of insolation at Earth surface, known as kyr-long Milankovi\'c cycles. The concept has been extended to the shorter time scales of years to centuries, that are relevant to tree growth. This paper focuses on iSSA of results of the dendro-chronological study of a forest of long-lived Tibetan junipers. From this, we determine a median curve of tree growth rates, that is analyzed by iSSA. We obtain a rich set of (pseudo-) periods, from 3.3 yr up to more than 1000 years, that compare with the specific spectral signature found in the sunspot and length-of-day time series. We discuss in detail the record from a single tree that spans almost completely the 357-2000 AD interval. The 90 yr Gleissberg, 22 yr and 30 yr components are quite prominent. The Oort, Wolf, Sp\"orer, Maunder and Dalton climate extrema all correspond quite precisely to extrema of the Gleissberg cycle. The well-known Medieval Climate Optimum, Little Ice Age and Modern Climate Optimum all seem to be mainly forced by variations in the envelope of the Gleissberg cycle. The Gleissberg cycle is strongly modulated with a period of 500-600 years. The node near a small gap in the data is very close to the Medieval Climate Optimum. Observations in different parts of Earth are in favor of a global extension of the MCO. In the same way that the Milankovic mathematical theory of climate allows one to relate climate change and length of day, through changes in inclination of Earth's rotation axis and solar insolation, it is reasonable to propose that the set of pseudo-periods that are evidenced in the Tibetan tree ring growth rates simply corresponds to short period Milankovi\'c cycles. The Dulan forest could be considered as a good candidate for a continuous, global geophysical observatory.Comment: 26 pages, 15 figure