earth scientist

"This finding, in and of itself, isn’t really new — I suspect any Earth scientist who has ever taught an introductory Earth History class could tell you this — we’re just one of the first to quantify, or put numbers to it," Judd said.

Chen and Saleska teamed up with Antonio Nobre, an Earth scientist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, who was using satellites to detect how landscape topography and groundwater tables interact with forests.

“Climate models are very sparse in computation,” says Sarat Sreepathi, a computational earth scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“Human impact goes much deeper into geological time,” said another committee member, Mike Walker, an earth scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

"Over geological time, the tectonic plates are pulling apart at about the speed that your fingernails grow, so a few centimetres a year," explains Prof Tamsin Mather, an Earth scientist from the University of Oxford.