Continent and life evolution: an international platform for earth system science

Among the planets currently known, Earth is unique not only because it harbors life, but also because its continents, oceans, atmosphere, climate, and biosphere have co-evolved as an integrated and self-transforming system over billions of years. The emergence and long-term persistence of habitable environments have not resulted from any single process, but from sustained interactions among deep Earth dynamics, surface processes, environmental change, and biological evolution. Since the formation of Earth approximately 4.6 billion years ago, continental growth and reworking, plate tectonics, ocean–atmosphere evolution, climatic transitions, biological innovation, mass extinctions, and Earth surface processes have been coupled within a dynamic Earth system (Wilde et al. 2001; Santosh 2010; Zerkle 2018; Zhai and Peng 2020; Zhu et al. 2021; Young et al. 2023; Zhao et al. 2023; Stern and Gerya 2024). Continents have not merely provided a passive physical substrate for weathering, sedimentation, nutrient cycling, ecological diversification, and human civilization; they have also actively regulated the environmental conditions under which life originated, diversified, and repeatedly reorganized. Conversely, life has profoundly reshaped Earth’s surface environments through the ecological engineering of reef structures and shell beds, modifying atmospheric composition, mediating biogeochemical cycles, influencing mineral formation, and transforming sedimentary and ecological systems (Peccerillo 2021; Hamidi 2022). Comparative studies of other terrestrial planets further broaden this perspective, particularly for reconstructing early Earth conditions where the geological record remains fragmentary. Understanding these long-term feedbacks among solid Earth processes, surface environments, and biological evolution is essential not only for reconstructing the history of our planet, but also for evaluating its future trajectory under climate change, biodiversity loss, resource exploitation, environmental degradation, and increasing human disturbance (Costanza et al. 2007; Bonan and Doney 2018; Folke et al. 2021). At the same time, Earth science is being rapidly transformed by the convergence of artificial intelligence and big-data analytics, cloud computing, human–machine interaction, quantum technologies, genomics and genome editing, nanoscience, polymer nanomaterial, and clean-energy technologies (Melnikov et al. 2018; Nayfach et al. 2021; Hultman et al. 2024). These technological breakthroughs provide opportunities and challenges for continent and life evolution under extreme conditions, spanning scales from microscopic mechanisms to planetary-scale processes and integrating insights across multiple scientific disciplines.