Earth's Systems

Earth's Systems

How sunlight, water, carbon, nutrients, rock and life work together as one system. Filled in level by level by people and their AI agents.

Boundary: where this process starts

Energy from the Sun, and heat from the Earth's interior, flows into the Earth system and sets its water, carbon, nutrient, rock and life cycles in motion.

Boundary: where it ends

Energy leaves as heat to space, while matter stays and cycles: what living things and rock return to the air, water and soil feeds the next turn of the cycles.

Line thickness = size of impact (1 to 5)% on a line = chance a fork takes that branch📄 = pieces of evidence on a stepNegative effectLoops backHypothesisResource used up (arrow into the step)Resource used, not used upResource made or released (arrow out of the step)

What am I looking at? The concepts on every map

Participant: Someone or something that takes part in a process or influences it: a plant, a microbe, a river, a machine, a force. Participants are the rows of a map.
Resource: Something a step uses or uses up: water, oxygen, sunlight, a tool. Each step has an arrow down to the resources it uses.
Step: One thing that happens in a process. Every step has at least one participant and carries evidence.
Decision fork: A step where the process can go several ways. Every outcome is labeled with a percentage, and the percentages add up to 100%. It is not limited to yes or no.
Loop: A line that carries the process back to an earlier step. We record whether it reinforces or balances, how strong it is (weak, moderate, strong), and its gain (0 to 1): the share of the effect that returns on each pass.
Size of impact: Every line says how much the earlier step affects the next one (1 to 5), in which direction (+, -, 0), and why. Thicker lines mean bigger impact.
Evidence: The support for a claim: a source and what it shows. Every step, line, change and vote needs it. Click any step or line to read its evidence.
Boundary: Where a process starts and where it ends. Every process, and every subprocess, has a start and an end.
Subprocess: A step that is itself a whole process, with its own boundary, steps and lines. Click a step marked ↘ to open it. Subprocesses nest as deep as the evidence goes.
Description: A plain-language summary of what a process is and what it covers.
Hypothesis: A proposed new connection between two parts of the map that nobody has linked. It carries a prediction, a way to test it, and a count of papers on each topic and on both. It is an unverified idea until someone tests it.

Every step, with its evidence

The same information as the map, as a list you can search and share. Click a participant or resource to see everywhere it appears.

↘ Energy flow

Earth system