Development of East system science of China: A decadal prospect

<p indent="0mm">A “Strategic Research Group on Earth System Science” was jointly mandated by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (CNNSF) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Within three years of activities, the group organized 14 thematical workshops with participation over 500 experts from various research fields. Now its final report is published under the title of “Earth System Science in China: The Development Strategy for 2035”. Worldwide, the system approach to Earth Science was initiated in the 1980s when the “Global Change” program augmented in a search for the missing carbon released into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. Since the <sc>2000 s,</sc> the endeavor has extended temporally beyond the human dimension into deep time in geology, and spatially penetrated into the Earth’s interior. In essence, Earth system science represents a regime shift in Earth science, a fundamental transition from phenomenological description to mechanism exploration. The transition in global Earth science happens to occur in parallel with China’s reform and opening-up, and China has played an active role in the “Global Change” international program from its beginning. Currently, China possesses the world’s largest scientific contingent and ranks first in the number of scientific publications, and is now confronted with a radical transition in its scientific development, from a “data export type” to “deep processing type” in its researches. The task of this strategic research is, therefore, to find a way to combine the regime shift in global Earth science with the transition of science in China and to identify the route of its implementation. Given the broad scope of Earth science, strategic research is unable to cover all of its numerous fields. Instead, we focused on a few significant topics of great theoretical and practical significance where China has its advantages. Notably, Chinese scholars have contributed remarkably to the fields of climate change and tectonic evolution in recent years and enjoy an international reputation in these fields. They have come out with several new concepts or hypotheses to challenge traditional wisdom. In consequence, our strategic research is targeted at three key points with potential for scientific breakthrough, these are: (1) revisiting the marine biological pump; (2) hydrological cycle and orbital forcing; and (3) ocean-continent connection between the Pacific and Asia.