Judy Twedt & Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
How can Earth system science reach us personally? It involves time frames and complexity that challenge ordinary imagination and exceed the scales of our existence. The history of life is the history of mass extinctions. These range over hundreds of millions of years predating the order of life as we know it. The data used to assemble some concept of the deep past and of planetary systems involves imperceptible, cumulative changes over vast spatial and temporal scales that appear clearly only at tipping points, often transforming the possibilities of human society as during the receding of the last Ice Age.