But experts now say there is no evidence that they maintain mental function in ageing individuals, at least over timescales of up to three years.
Secular resonances, in which two orbits interact through the motions of their ascending nodes, perihelia, or both, operate over timescales of millions of years to change the eccentricity and inclination of asteroids.
The review states: Catastrophic, widespread dissociation of methane gas hydrates will not be triggered by continued climate warming at contemporary rates (0.2ºC per decade; IPCC 2007) over timescales of a few hundred years.
But are tropical forests resilient to environmental and anthropogenic disturbances over timescales of centuries or millennia?
Like all natural hazards, space weather exhibits occasional extreme events over timescales of decades to centuries.
We consider geomagnetic field variation occurring over timescales of seconds to days and induction within the solid Earth over lithospheric depthscales of hundreds to thousands of kilometers.
The breadth of the included system, coupled with short run-times, enables predictions over timescales of decades, which we refer to as the Mesoscale.
In an actively deforming orogen, maintenance of a topographic steady state requires that hillslope erosion, river incision, and rock uplift rates are balanced over timescales of 105 107 years.
Under these conditions detachment phenomena were quite rapid with in most cases complete detachment being achieved over timescales of the order of 30 s.
