Introduction

Geoscience is a fundamental natural science discipline dealing with the origin, evolutionary history and behaviour of the planet Earth. As a result of its complicated and complex nature, the Earth system not only provides the necessary materials and environment for mankind to live, but also brings many types of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods and tornadoes, to mention just a few. With the ever-increasing demand for improving our living standards, it has been recognized that the existing natural resources will be exhausted in the near future and that our living environments are, in fact, deteriorating. To maintain the sustainable development of our living standards and the further improvement of our living environments, an inevitable and challenging task that geoscientists are now confronting is how accurately to predict not only the occurrences of these natural disasters, but also the locations of large concealed natural resources in the deep Earth. For this reason, geoscientists must study the processes, rules and laws, by which the Earth system operates, instead of simply describing and observing geoscience phenomena. Specifically, geoscientists need to make greater efforts in the following aspects relevant to solving contemporary geoscience problems: (1) the complicated and complex interactions between multi-scales and multi-processes occurring in the solid Earth; (2) gather, accumulate and analyze the large amount of information and data that are essential to understand each of the controlling processes within the interior of the Earth using modern observation equipment, measurement tools, experimental instruments and information processing techniques; (3) the intimate interplay between the solid Earth, biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. It is this intimate interplay that controls the global behaviour of the Earth system. As a result, geoscientists must adopt scientific and predictive methods relevant to conduction of contemporary geoscience research, instead of simply using the traditional descriptive methods.