What are Earth Systems?

(upbeat music) How does upland deforestation impact water quality downstream? How do melting glaciers in the Arctic affect sea level in Florida? The field of Earth systems science can help answer these complicated global questions. But what are Earth systems, and why are they so important? The Earth is a large, complex planet made up of many different systems that interact in countless ways.

Scientists divide our complicated Earth up into simpler processes so they can be studied more easily, and this concept is called Earth systems. Though separating our Earth's processes can help us understand them, in reality, these systems remain interconnected with one another. The four main systems or spheres are air, land, water, and life. The air system is called the atmosphere.

It contains gases, regulates temperature and blocks radiation, houses weather and wind, and drives climate systems on Earth. The land system is called the geosphere. Within the geosphere are rocks, soil, continents, fossils, and tectonic plates. The geosphere is composed of features at the Earth's surface as well as everything below, including the Earth's core.

The water system is called the hydrosphere. It includes all the salty and fresh water across the globe and how it all moves through the water cycle. The biosphere is made up of all life on Earth. It includes plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and all the interactions between them--like symbiosis and predation. In addition to those main four,

other Earth systems include the anthroposphere, human interactions; the magnetosphere, everything to do with the Earth's magnetic field; and the exosphere, everything outside our planet like the solar system and beyond. Earth systems science is the study of all of these different spheres and how they interact. For a long time, scientists had studied things like