10 Reasons Why Earth Science is Important?

1. Earth Science literacy empowers us to understand our environment, make wise decisions that affect quality of life, and manage resources, environments, and hazards.
2. Earth's dynamic equilibrium system contains subsystems from atoms to planetary spheres.  Materials interact among these subsystems due to normal forces and energy that flows from sources inside and outside of the planet.  These interactions, changes, forces, and flows from sources inside and outside of the planet.  Materials tend to flow in chains, cycles, and webs that tend toward equilibrium states in which energy is distributed as uniformly as possible.  The net result is a state of balanced change or dynamic equilibrium, a condition that appears to have existed for billions of years
3. Change through time produced Earth, the net result of constancy, gradual changes, and episodic changes over human, geological, and astronomical scales of time and space.
4. Extraterrestrial influences upon Earth include extraterrestrial energy and materials, and influences due to Earth's position and motion as a subsystem of an evolving Solar System, galaxy, and universe.
5. The dynamic geosphere includes a rocky exterior upon which ecosystems and human communities developed and a molten interior with convection circulation that generates the magnetosphere and drives plate tectonics.  It contains resources that sustain life, causes natural hazards that may threaten life, and affects all earth's other geospheres.
6. Fluid spheres within the earth system include the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and cryosphere, which interact and flow to produce ever-changing weather, climate, glaciers, seascapes, and water resources that affect human communities, and which shape the land, transfer earth materials, energy, and change surface environments and ecosystems.
7. Dynamic environments and ecosystems are produced by the interaction of all the geospheres at the earth's surface and include many different environments, ecosystems, and communities that affect one another and change through time.
8. Earth resources include the nonrenewable and renewable supplies of energy, mineral, and water resources upon which individuals and communities depend in order to maintain quality of human life, economic prosperity, and requirements for industrialization.
9. Natural hazards associated with Earth processes and events include drought, floods, storms, volcanic activity, earthquakes, and climate change that can pose risks to humans, their property, and communities.  Earth Science is used to study, predict, and mitigate natural hazards so that we can assess risks, plan wisely, and adapt to the effects of natural hazards.
10. In order to sustain the presence and quality of human life, humans and communities must understand their dependency on earth resources and environments, realize how they influence Earth systems, appreciate earth's carrying capacity, manage and conserve nonrenewable resources and environments, develop alternate sources of energy and materials needed for human sustenance, and invent new technologies.