The emergence and evolution of Earth System Science

Abstract

For tens of thousands of years, indigenous cultures around the world have recognized cycles and systems in the environment, and that humans are an integral part of these. However, it was only in the early 20th century that contemporary systems thinking was applied to the Earth, initiating the emergence of Earth System Science (ESS). Building on the recognition that life exerts a strong influence on the Earth's chemical and physical environment, ESS originated in a Cold War context with the rise of environmental and complex system sciences 1-3. The ESS framework has since become a powerful tool for understanding how Earth operates as a single, complex, adaptive system, driven by the diverse interactions between energy, matter and organisms. In particular, it connects traditional disciplines-which typically examine components in isolation-to build a unified understanding of the Earth. With human activities increasingly destabilizing the system over the last two centuries, this perspective is necessary for studying global changes and their planetary-level impacts and risks, including phenomena science in the 1980s, global expansion in the 1990s and present-day ESS. A timeline of key events, publications and organizations that characterize the evolution of ESS is shown in Fig. 1. Beginnings (pre-1970s). Past conceptualizations of the Earth formed important precursors to the contemporary understanding of the Earth System. Examples include J. Hutton's 1788 'theory of the Earth' , Humboldtian science in the 19th century and V. Vernadsky's 1926 'The Biosphere' 7. Understanding the historical roots of ESS, however, requires a focus on the second half of the 20th century when, in a Cold War context, important shifts occurred in the Earth and environmental sciences 8. Thanks to military patronage taking precedence over traditional sources of funding for Earth sciences, geophysics experienced unprecedented growth 9. Moreover, surveying and monitoring the global environment became a strategic imperative, providing information that would later be useful for contemporary ESS 10,11. In the middle of the 20th century, international science started to develop, epitomized by the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957-1958 (reF. 12). This unprecedented research campaign coordinated the efforts of 67 countries to obtain a more integrated understanding of the geosphere, particularly glaciology, oceanography and meteorology. One of the key impacts of the IGY was a lasting transformation in the practices used to understand how the Earth works. The interpretative and qualitative geological and climatological research based on field observations-as classically studied by geographers-was replaced by field instrumentation, continuous and quantitative monitoring of multiple variables and numerical models 13. This transformation led to the two contemporary paradigms that structure the Earth sciences: modern climatology and plate tectonics 14,15. Ecology and environmental sciences also developed rapidly 16. Ecosystem ecology emerged with th...

The COVID-19 lockdowns: a window into the Earth System

“…As with previous calamities, such as volcanic eruptions [1][2][3] , electrical blackouts 4 and the short-term reductions in human mobility following the 11 September attacks 5 , the current COVID-19 crisis will inevitably present a new test bed for understanding how the Earth System works, including the critical role of humans 6 . This test bed could provide answers to long-standing…”

“…Likewise, because the large-scale reduction in human activity will necessarily be temporary, it will be possible to observe whether or how Earth System processes return to their previous states after activity returns to something approaching pre-pandemic levels. The event, therefore, provides a unique test bed for probing hypotheses about Earth System sensitivities, feedbacks, boundaries and cascades 6,[9][10][11] , presuming that the observing systems are in place to capture these responses (Box 1).…”

Are we ignoring a black elephant in the Anthropocene? Climate change and global pandemic as the crisis in health and equality

“…In the field of global environmental change research, climate change is often used as a shorthand for global sustainability challenges. The major concern of researchers in this field is largely concentrated upon regulating the stability of the Earth System within “planetary boundaries”—a safe operating space for humanity (Rockström et al 2009 ; see also Steffen et al 2020 ). The concept of planetary boundaries has become a dominant framework for integrating the physical science of understanding the processes of the Earth System into the social science of studying the policy and governance response at the global level.…”

“…A call for declaring a climate emergency (Lenton et al 2019 ) is, in this respect, a political attempt by scientists to warn about how little time is left to avoid such a catastrophic scenario. A problem is however that there is little attention paid to the human societies, which are seen as an integral part of the Earth System (Steffen et al 2020 ). Like a well-known German sociologist Ulrich Beck ( 2010 ) said: “If ‘the environment’ only includes everything which is not human, not social, then the concept is sociologically empty.”…”

The logics of enclosure: deep‐time trajectories in the spread of land tenure boundaries in late prehistoric northern Europe

“…When the time depth of key environmental and anthropological concerns is extended beyond the present, otherwise invisible trajectories of the Anthropocene unfold and become visible (Steffen et al . 2020: 58; cf. Bailey 2007: 199).…”