Earth System Initiative (ESI)

The MIT Earth System Initiative is a research and educational enterprise that cuts across environmentally-oriented disciplines such as geology, atmospheric science, oceanography, biology, chemistry, and environmental engineering.

In the tradition of innovation that characterizes MIT, this Initiative provides a fertile ground for a new kind of Earth exploration – one that will marshal revolutionary tools and technologies to answer fundamental questions about life on Earth.

By unveiling the processes of physical and biological change, ESI will build the understanding required to sustain the vital functions of the Earth system for future generations.

In recent years, our society has become more aware of the delicate balance of the Earth system, and has devoted much time and energy to debates over how best to ensure a sustainable future for the planet.

The Earth System Initiative is predicated on the notion that, to be meaningful, these debates must be informed by reliable scientific data regarding the evolution and current state of our planet.

ESI scientists and engineers marshal their efforts around four broad research themes:

(*) System Characterization -- Understanding how the Earth functions is an extraordinary challenge. To meet it, we can take our lead from the medical community in which scientists and engineers from diverse disciplines have pooled their intellectual resources to understand the human body and develop modern medicine.

The same ingenuity must be applied to understanding the "anatomy" and "metabolism" of our planet. ESI has taken the first step in this diagnostic process with the establishment of a cohesive program to understanding the "anatomy" and "metabolism" of our planet.

With its strong tradition of observational science and progressive engineering, MIT is an ideal setting for the kinds of collaborative research that will lead to the design of new monitoring technology and new protocols for the acquisition, storage and interpretation of "global-scale" data streams.

(*) System Organization -- The planet we inhabit today is the product of over four and one-half billion years of evolution of the ocean, land, atmospere, and -for the past 3.5 billion years- living organisms. While many of these evolutionary processes are regarded as capricious, the Earth displays remarkably complex structure at scales ranging from molecular to global. The source of this structure, how it emerged and how it is maintained, are among the great mysteries of modern science.

The Earth's metabolism is the product of the billions of organisms that constitute the biosphere, most of them microbes. How can a global system that is regulated within precise bounds emerge from such small-scale processes? Do the genes of individual organisms contain the necessary information to regulate it? Or is there another source of information that we are missing-something that orchestrates their collective properties? How many different genes are there on Earth? How many different species are there, and what is the minimum required for an ecosystem to function properly? Do species' identities matter in the feedback loops of the Earth system? Or can one be easily substituted for another? What are the origins of biological diversity? What are the environmental limits of life?

These are some of the profound questions that lie at the heart of the Earth System Initiative. One of our goals is to employ new genomic techniques, such as those developed for the Human Genome Project, to crack open the "global genome" and determine the different roles genes play in ecosystem function

\(*) Evolutionary Processes -- Understanding the process of biological evolution, not simply from the perspective of individual organisms but also from the perspective of entire ecosystems, is an important focus of ESI. Researchers within the program are active in studies aimed at constraining the origin of life on Earth (and elsewhere in the Solar System) and the pace of biological evolution through geologic time. Studies of modern biological systems focus on the connection between life processes at the molecular level and the dynamics of the biosphere on a global level.

(*) Human Impacts and Intervention -- With regard to the Earth system, ultimately we want to move from ignorance to understanding, from diagnosis to cure. We want to help realize a different and better world fifty years from now. One in which systematic measurements of biological, chemical, and physical properties inform the questions we ask regarding the "health" of the planet. They will permit us to differentiate natural variability from changes caused by humans. They will enable a more reliable accounting of our impact on the survival of other species.

Armed with such information, it is our hope that mankind will develop a management plan for the Earth system that is based on a deep understanding of its design and properties. This plan undoubtedly will lead to a heightened respect for its inherently complex behavior.

The Earth System Initiative facilitates the development of large-scale research efforts in key areas of Earth system science and engineering. In December 2006, the Darwin Project, the first example of such an undertaking, was launched.