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In Greek antiquity the ideas of celestial spheres and rings first appeared in the cosmology of Anaximander in the early 6th century BC. [7] In his cosmology both the Sun and Moon are circular open vents in tubular rings of fire enclosed in tubes of condensed air; these rings constitute the rims of rotating chariot-like wheels pivoting on the Earth at their centre.
The five components of the climate system all interact. They are the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. [1]: 1451 Earth's climate system is a complex system with five interacting components: the atmosphere (air), the hydrosphere (water), the cryosphere (ice and permafrost), the lithosphere (earth's upper rocky layer) and the biosphere (living things).
Like the broader subject of systems science, Earth system science assumes a holistic view of the dynamic interaction between the Earth's spheres and their many constituent subsystems fluxes and processes, the resulting spatial organization and time evolution of these systems, and their variability, stability and instability.
The centre of the Earth is the centre of the lunar sphere—the orbit of the Moon around the Earth. All the spheres rotate around the Sun, which is near the centre of the Universe. The distance between the Earth and the Sun is an insignificant fraction of the distance from the Earth and the Sun to the stars, so parallax is not observed in the ...
The Earth's radius is the distance from Earth's center to its surface, about 6,371 km (3,959 mi). While "radius" normally is a characteristic of perfect spheres, the Earth deviates from spherical by only a third of a percent, sufficiently close to treat it as a sphere in many contexts and justifying the term "the radius of the Earth".
The anthroposphere is the youngest of all the Earth's spheres, yet has made an enormous impact on the Earth and its systems in a very short time. [ 5 ] Some consider the term anthroposphere to be synonymous with the noosphere , though the noosphere is often used to refer specifically to the sphere of rational human thought, or ‘the ...
The ancient Greeks assumed the literal truth of stars attached to a celestial sphere, revolving about the Earth in one day, and a fixed Earth. [9] The Eudoxan planetary model , on which the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic models were based, was the first geometric explanation for the "wandering" of the classical planets . [ 10 ]
The lithosphere, however, only refers to the uppermost layers of the solid Earth (oceanic and continental crustal rocks and uppermost mantle). [ 3 ] Since space exploration began, it has been observed that the extent of the ionosphere or plasmasphere is highly variable, and often much larger than previously appreciated, at times extending to ...