When Geoscience Meets Foundation Models: Toward a general geoscience artificial intelligence system

Artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced Earth sciences, yet its full potential in comprehensively modeling Earth’s complex dynamics remains unrealized. Geoscience foundation models (GFMs) have emerged as a paradigm-shifting solution, integrating extensive cross-disciplinary data to enhance the simulation and understanding of Earth system dynamics. These data-centric AI (DCAI) models extract insights from petabytes of structured and unstructured data, effectively addressing the complexities of Earth systems that traditional models struggle to capture. The unique strengths of GFMs include flexible task specification, diverse input-output capabilities, and multimodal knowledge representation, enabling analyses that surpass those of individual data sources or traditional AI methods. This review not only highlights the key advantages of GFMs but also presents essential techniques for their construction, with a focus on Transformers, pretraining, and adaptation strategies. Subsequently, we examine recent advancements in GFMs, including large language models (LLMs), vision models, vision-language models (VLMs), and foundation-model-based agents, particularly emphasizing the potential applications in remote sensing (RS). Additionally, the review concludes with a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and future trends in GFMs, addressing five critical aspects: data integration, model complexity, uncertainty quantification, interdisciplinary collaboration, and concerns related to privacy, trust, and security. This review offers a comprehensive overview of emerging geoscientific research paradigms, emphasizing the untapped opportunities at the intersection of advanced AI techniques and geoscience. It examines major methodologies, showcases advances in large-scale models, and discusses the challenges and prospects that will shape the future landscape of GFMs. This article highlights a dynamic field rich with possibilities, poised to unlock new insights into Earth’s complexities and further advance geoscience exploration.