Changes in the natural environment that are the result of human activities are becoming evident. Since these changes are interrelated and can not be investigated without interdisciplinary collaboration between scientific fields, Earth system science (ESS) is required to provide a framework for recognizing anew the Earth system as one composed of its interacting subsystems. The concept of ESS ha...

Google Earth now hosts high-resolution imagery that spans twenty percent of the Earth's landmass and more than a third of the human population. This contemporary highresolution archive represents a significant, rapidly expanding, cost-free and largely unexploited resource for scientific inquiry. To increase the scientific utility of this archive, we address horizontal positional accuracy (geore...

[1] Monte Carlo inversion techniques were first used by Earth scientists more than 30 years ago. Since that time they have been applied to a wide range of problems, from the inversion of free oscillation data for whole Earth seismic structure to studies at the meter-scale lengths encountered in exploration seismology. This paper traces the development and application of Monte Carlo methods for ...

Plants show a wide array of functional diversity, as evidenced by the wide range of plant traits that are measured worldwide. This diversity in traits has important implications for the global carbon cycle and its feedbacks with climate change, as traits govern the key processes of plant growth, reproduction, and mortality that underlie the terrestrial carbon cycle. Most Earth system models (ES...

TGD inspired quantum cosmology predicts that astrophysical objects do not follow cosmic expansion except in jerk-wise quantum leaps increasing the gigantic value of the gravitational Planck constant hgr characterizing space-time mediating gravitational interactions between two masses or gravitational self interactions. This assumption provides explanation for the apparent cosmological constant....

Microscopic eukaryotes are abundant, diverse and fill critical ecological roles across every ecosystem on Earth, yet there is a well-recognized gap in understanding of their global biodiversity. Fundamental advances in DNA sequencing and bioinformatics now allow accurate en masse biodiversity assessments of microscopic eukaryotes from environmental samples. Despite a promising outlook, the fiel...

In one form or another, geochronologists have been practicing thermochronology1, the use of radioisotopic dating to constrain thermal histories of rocks and minerals, for over 40 years. Building from lessons learned over these four decades, thermochronology continues to evolve due to technical developments, increasingly sophisticated theoretical models, and an expanding range of applications in...

Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is the core data for three-dimensional visualization and geographical spatial analysis. With the implementation of Digital Earth, the amount of various DEM data is rapidly expanding. In order to compress DEM data, researchers ever put forward two kinds of DEM compression methods: Generic entropy encoding compression; Converting grid DEM to TIN DEM [1][2]. In recent...

Ionic liquids, low temperature molten salts, have various advantages manifesting themselves as durable and environmentally friendly solvents. Their application is expanding into various fields including hydrometallurgy due to their unique properties such as non-volatility, inflammability, low toxicity, good ionic conductivity, and wide electrochemical potential window. This paper reviews previo...

Earth is just a single planet in a large, complex system. Since the 1600s, we as a race have sought to expand our understanding of this system. How many planets are there? How is each planet different from ours, and why do these differences exist. Since the advent of space travel, research has expanded, until we know a great deal about our solar system. Yet, at the same time that our knowledge ...