Our vision for earth-base is science- and data-focused. We think of earth-base as a tetrahedron linking the solid, fluid, living earths and the rock record. This illustrates the basic principle that motivates us: earth systems are interconnected, and there is no logical “center” that should dominate this effort.

As one very simple example of earth systems connections, every year, pCO₂ measurements from Mauna Loa, Hawaii go up and down by more than 5 ppm, a rate of change that far exceeds the steady ~1 ppm annual increase that can be attributed to human activity. This strong annual variability in pCO₂ is the result of two things:

1. the annual growth and decay of CO₂, H₂O, and sunlight-derived biomass, and
2. a present-day northern hemisphere bias in the distribution of continental land area.

Thus, today our planet literally breathes, and it does so with a period of one year because plate tectonics has resulted in an unequal hemispherical distribution of landmass, because earth's rotational axis is tilted, and because large amounts of terrestrial (and marine) photosynthetic biomass forms and decays in the northern hemisphere as winter comes and goes. These types of interconnections between earth systems occur on many different spatial and temporal scales.

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