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

from Part Two - One Anthropocene; Many Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2022

By
Will Steffen
Edited by
Julia Adeney Thomas
Julia Adeney Thomas
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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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.

Keywords

Earth SystemSecond Copernican revolutionGaiaAnthropoceneGreat AccelerationBretherton diagramCatastrophe domainsgravityBlue Marble
Type
Chapter
Information
Altered Earth
Getting the Anthropocene Right
 , pp. 83 - 105
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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