There is not much disagreement on the idea that the planet on which we live is the only resource for human existence. Current changes in the ‘system earth’ will have a profound impact on the future standard of living. Most prominently, climate and energy are the themes of great and immediate concern, with widespread bifurcations in fields such as the availability of water and food, global warming and its effects on sea level and weather intensity, but also on the most effective exploration and exploitation of the Earth’s subsurface resources. In all these fields, it is evident that the Earth is a system in which oceans, solid earth, atmosphere, land cover, and cryosphere interact in complex ways and on many possible scale levels. From micro to global 3D spatial scales, and from real-time to geological time scales, there is interaction. The only way in which this system can be properly understood, predicted, and exploited, is by focusing on this interaction, via observations and modeling.

Through a combination of science and engineering, tremendous progress has been made in our knowledge on how the system Earth functions. At the department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing we study planet Earth in all its facets, using state-of the art satellite and earth-based sensors. Fundamental disciplines such as geophysics, geodesy and atmospheric sciences form the basis of our experience.