This Inter- and Transdisciplinary Session will critically re-examine outstanding questions and long-standing paradigms in Earth system science in the context of global climate. Earth system science has developed around the idea of dynamic interactions among atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, geosphere, and cryosphere, through flows of energy, material, and information.
Scientific progress helps us identify which of these flows are most important in different contexts, and the rules and processes —physical, biological, chemical, and ecological—that govern them. Over time, established ideas can be confirmed, challenged, or reshaped by new evidence, leading to gradual shifts or even step changes in understanding. To give some examples across disciplines and spatial-temporal scales:
- The understanding of clouds and their role in the Earth system is rapidly evolving, with major recent advances in mapping out and characterizing the properties of atmospheric aerosol particles and their interactions with clouds.
- The latest high-resolution climate simulations, built on decades on climate modelling, expose previously overlooked complexities in ocean-atmosphere coupling, revealing how fine-scale interactions can affect weather extremes.
- Soil organic matter was once conceptualized as chemically defined compartments with fixed turnover times, a view later revised to emphasize the role of physical protection mechanisms in controlling carbon and nutrient cycling.
- A century-old paradigm of vertical crustal stacking beneath the Himalayan-Tibetan orogen has been challenged by new geodynamical simulations revealing the Asian mantle as an active uplift mechanism and structural support for the region’s topography.
This session invites contributions that revisit and reflect on the foundational literature that has shaped our current understanding of Earth system science. We welcome critical engagement with influential frameworks or seminal papers —whether by questioning, expanding, or reinterpreting them in the light of recent advances. The aim is to explore how scientific knowledge evolves over time and how earlier ideas have informed this evolution and continue to affect or challenge present-day thinking.