Taking the Pulse of Our Planet | National Geographic

A lot of our mapping and a lot of our work is about discovery. Still, it's still that way, but it's equal now to measurements that will help people make better decisions at a scale that is really important. That scale might be the state of California scale or the United States of America or a watershed or the planet.

A lot of people think that humans exist within nature and that we either destroy it or we don't destroy it. We're in an age of earth management. The human footprint and our capability to change things for better or for worse is so powerful now because of our technology and how many of us there are on the planet.

And now we actually have this planet we're sitting on that we need to manage. You know, you can think of water as the lifeblood; it’s the blood flow. And it's really not just one cycle; it's the interaction of things like the carbon cycle and other biogeochemical cycles.

As humans, we have sort of intervened; we have quickened the pulse of the planet. I don't know if a heart attack is imminent or not, but we've had a huge impact. We have to be doing what we can right now to get the best possible information. This models the best understanding of the physical processes so that we can actually take meaningful action.