Earth's surface temperature and atmospheric oxygen have swung wildly over billions of years, but no one can yet explain why. A new computer model aims to change that. The problem is timescale. Simulating the planet's full climate, geology, and chemistry over a billion years requires computational power that does not yet exist. SIM-EARTH will use a novel technique to couple plate tectonics, physical climate, and global biogeochemical cycles in a single 3D, time-evolving model for the first time. This will allow researchers to test competing hypotheses about what drove Earth's transformation from a barren rock to a temperate, oxygen-rich world that supports intelligent life. If successful, the model will identify which fundamental processes—such as volcanic outgassing, weathering, or biological activity—are most important in shaping a planet's surface. This is primarily fundamental science. It will not directly improve weather forecasts or carbon budgets tomorrow. But understanding why Earth became habitable could sharpen predictions of how our own planet will respond to long-term change, and help astronomers decide which exoplanets are worth targeting in the search for life. Past fundamental research on Earth's deep past, for example, revealed the role of oxygen in enabling complex evolution—a discovery that reshaped biology and planetary science alike.
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The temperature of Earth's surface and the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and oceans has changed dramatically over our planet's history, but there is no consensus on what has driven these changes. We do not understand the relative importance of the fundamental processes that have made our planet suitable for complex life, and this is impairing our ability to understand our own evolution, to map our planet's future, and to make predictions about what type of planets might support complex life in general. A key reason for this lack of understanding is our inability to simulate the evolution of Earth's surface conditions in a realistic computer model because of the extreme billion-year timescales involved. The computational demand to do this is just far too high. SIM-EARTH will use a new computational technique that I have recently prototyped to couple plate tectonics, physical climate and global biogeochemical cycles over billions of years, creating for the first time a 3D and time-evolving model of a planetary surface environment. This model will finally allow us to integrate all of the hypothesised processes that might control Earth's environment, and opens up the ability to use rigorous model-data comparison at local and global scales to identify which processes are the most important. The outcome will help us understand what underlying properties of our planet have led to the temperate and high-oxygen environment which has allowed for the evolution of intelligent life. This project will provide a set of completely new insights into important periods of Earth's past, will inform us about how to best preserve our world for humans, and will help decide where we should look for intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy.
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