| Summary: | the next century? How fast will ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland melt and raise global sea level? Will rising temperature and acidification of the oceans extinguish corals and other endangered marine ecosystems? Will global warming cause hurricanes more powerful than Andrew and Katrina? What triggers the massive earthquakes that cause large tsunamis such as the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean event? These questions of hab-itability, sustainability, and survival are dri-ving a surge of research in earth sys-tem science, a field that incorporates atmos-pheric science, earth science, ecology, and
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