juni 2023

Most life-sustaining resources are supplied by Earth’s critical zone—the thin outer terrestrial layer of the planet that extends from the surface of unaltered bedrock to the top of vegetation and the atmospheric boundary layer. The critical zone addresses the critical dependence of humans on the terrestrial surface layer, which is under critical pressure from human activity and is a critical interface of Earth planetary systems. The critical zone exhibits dominant material, information and energy fluxes governed by land-atmosphere, soil-vegetation, shallow geosphere-lithosphere, and land-ocean interactions. The role of soil in the processing of energy, material, and biodiversity is essential to the…

Multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly and irreversibly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce greater harm than they would have individually, if their host systems were not so profoundly interconnected. Humanity is in the midst of this interdependent, complex, dynamic world in a constant flux of change. The Earth System crisis is particularly pressing. The present excess of economic hubris in plundering and colonizing the earth, an anthropocentric colonization, is leading to a very different state of the Earth System, one that is likely to be much less hospitable to the development of human societies….

Life is an astonishingly emergent property of matter, full-blown in its complexity today, some billions of years after it started out in presumably some very simple form. The fundamental question is whether life as we know it – it’s astonishing chemical complexity – is a very improbable occurrence or a nearly inevitable evolution of dynamic off-equilibrium chemical matter. A question of almost miracles or the inevitability of laws of physics and chemistry. In spite of recent rapid development of biology, chemistry, Earth science and astronomy, the origin of life (abiogenesis) is still a mystery. The sources of Earth’s evolving chemical…