The evolving Earth / Развивающаяся Земля

The earth is a dynamic planet, always changing and evolving. Its oceans and atmospheres have transformed radically since the earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago. Its crust is in constant motion, pulling continents apart and slamming them together to produce the great earthquakes and volcanoes. The core and mantle beneath are also flowing and moving, causing the changes in the crust above and in the magnetic field that shields us all from cosmic radiation. Finally, life on earth is closely tied to the changes in the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and lithosphere. Major changes in the physical environment of the planet have strongly influenced life (especially during mass extinctions), while life itself changes the earth in ways that occur on no other planet. Life produced the oxygen we breathe, changes the carbon dioxide concentrations of the atmosphere by storing it in crustal reservoirs like coal, oil, and gas, or weathered soil, or releasing it when events remove carbon from the crust. Life controls the flow of nutrients in the ocean, and transformed the surface of the land from a barren wasteland to the lush green surface that it is in most places. Finally, humans are intricately connected to all these cycles and changes, and we would not be here if it were not for some extraordinary accidents, such as the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs and left the world wide open for our mammalian ancestors. Humans have now become a force of nature ourselves, wiping out entire species and ecosystems, transforming the crust, taking its resources, and now poisoning our own home with our pollution and destructive patterns of growth and consumption <...>