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1 results

  • Chapter 3 - Earth System Science: Gravity, the Earth System, and the Anthropocene

  • from Part Two - One Anthropocene; Many Stories
  • Edited by Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
  • Book:
    Altered Earth
    Published online:
    24 March 2022
    Print publication:
    31 March 2022, pp 83-105

  • Summary

    This piece takes the reader on a virtual trip through the Earth System, using visualisations as a key tool to understand our home planet and our evolving knowledge about it. It begins and ends with trips between the Earth’s surface and space, experiencing the Earth System from above. In between, however, we take an historical tour of the planet, tracking the evolution of humanity’s growing understanding of the Earth and how it functions as a system. The tour wanders through the evolving scientific landscape, beginning with the famous ‘Blue Marble’ image of Earth taken by the Apollo 11spacecraft in 1972, continuing with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and John Schellnhuber’s second Copernican revolution, and finishing with Paul Crutzen’s confronting assertion that the Earth System is now in the Anthropocene, leaving humanity’s comfort zone of the Holocene as a receding memory.