Leading the world! How does the "atlas" of the country's heavyweight simulate the earth after ten thousand years, and the mystery of the earth is under control?

Have you ever wondered what you would do if there was a laboratory that could simulate life on earth? Is to see what dinosaurs really look like? Or do you want to see the grand occasion of the European navigation era? Or to spy on the earth in a thousand years?

Needless to say, your idea is likely to come true in the near future. Today, I will take you into a brand-new national heavyweight Atlas.

In 202 1 year, lasg will contribute an "Earth System Numerical Simulation Device" to China, and the name of this device is "Atlas".

In fact, before this, the United States has done relevant experiments, and the research project is also earth simulation, but the process does not seem to be smooth.

199 1 In September, the United States established the Biosphere 2 Ecological Laboratory in the desert of Arizona. Eight scientists participated in this experiment, aiming at studying the effects of animals and plants, air and soil on natural air conditioning in this completely sealed environment, and better understanding the ecological laws of the earth.

However, this experiment ended in failure for many reasons, so I won't repeat it here. But this experiment made the world realize that if human beings continue to wantonly destroy the earth's ecological environment, it will be difficult to move in the future.

Since it is not feasible to put scientists into experiments, it is better to have a digital simulation of the earth. As a result, China recently released a new message about "Earth System Simulator", so what is it like?

Before understanding the "Atlas", let's take a look at how it came from.

According to the Paris agreement signed in 20 16, after a simulated "earth" is put into the laboratory, all the changes will be calculated by the earth system simulator, and finally how the natural system of the "earth" reacts under different carbon dioxide emissions will be observed, so as to reach a temperature standard suitable for the future ecological environment of the earth. The "earth" mentioned here is not the blue star where we live, but a "digital earth" composed of various mathematical and physical formulas.

Scientists believe that all the organic and even inorganic substances on the earth, including air, rivers, lakes and seas, mountains and rivers, ice and snow, and life, can be simply divided into five layers: atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere.

People living on the earth feel the changes brought by each circle, and at the same time, they can sum up some laws of natural changes, which can be expressed by mathematical formulas.

The "Earth System Simulator" came from this. After digitizing the earth, you can observe what happened on the earth at that time as long as you input the data at a certain moment. Through the large-scale calculation of supercomputers, human beings can get the laws of the evolution of the earth, and even reproduce the past, simulate the present and predict the future.

Having said that, what can China's "Atlas" do?

In fact, when I first heard this name, I was also puzzled. What does this "atlas" mean?

Although the official did not give the reason for the name, is it another netizen crowdfunding? Of course, the word atlas represents a vast area, meaning every corner of the country. The name also illustrates its function. Simulating "all corners of the country" is just simulating "the earth".

Compared with the United States, China's simulation system does not need "real people" to do experiments, only scientists need to move their fingers in the background and input data.

However, the fact is certainly not as simple as I said. Atlas not only needs to build an earth simulation system, but also needs a regional high-precision environmental simulation system with a spatial resolution of up to 3 kilometers, a huge database and data visualization system, and numerous infrastructure configurations, so the workload behind it is huge and cannot be solved by hand.

Atlas will be located in Huairou, Beijing. It will make use of the latest technical level, and develop to multi-dimensions with simulating the earth as the core. When completed in the future, it will become a template for the scientific research of the earth system in China.

Although China started late in this field, Atlas still uses the numerical simulation software system independently developed by China, which has a complete simulation of ecological processes and the resolution has reached the world's leading level. And in many ways, the interaction between the various circles of the earth is fully considered. In the future, the changes of "weather, glaciers and plots" will be further simulated.

In other words, Atlas can not only simulate the earth for us, but also accurately predict the weather, melting glaciers, earthquakes and even volcanic eruptions.

However, no matter how powerful the internal data in Atlas is, it is an analog system after all, and it cannot be matched without a good supercomputer.

Scientists in China have specially developed domestic super chips and high-performance computers for Atlas, which are powerful, and the computing power in one minute is equivalent to that of 7.2 billion people in the world using computers for four years at the same time. The special "Silicon Cube" database has a storage space of 80PB, which can hold all the data of 13 national libraries.

From the previous introduction, we can know that the earth we live in is a complex ecosystem composed of closely related layers, and each layer contains its own physical, chemical and biological processes, so the most important thing in the earth simulation system is authenticity. Only when it is true enough can we accurately describe all the processes in each circle and realize our imaginary "simulating the past and spying on the future".

As the embodiment of a country's comprehensive national strength, scientists all over the world are developing their own research models. For example, in the recent Sixth International Coupled Model Comparison Program, 33 institutions participated in it and provided about 1 12 climate model versions.

In other words, the competition of climate simulation models in the world is fierce now, but they are only climate simulation, and only a few countries such as the United States, China and Japan can provide earth system simulation. See, China is impressively listed, that is to say, China's earth simulation system is one of the best in the world.

CAS-ESM, the earth system model developed by China, is the core software of Atlas. Compared with other software, CAS-ESM is much better in simulating global vegetation and productivity.

Dayu believes that although our "atlas" has not yet been officially born, so many data comparisons have proved that our country's heavy weapons are very powerful.

But the "atlas" that has invested so much energy can't just be used to see what dinosaurs look like, can it? So what role does it play in later life? Let me analyze the practicability of earth simulation for you.

China has long established the development policy of "carbon neutrality", which is not only a large-scale energy saving and emission reduction, but also the development of new energy. At the same time, it is still planting trees to capture and store carbon. The purpose is to balance the emission and absorption of carbon dioxide, so as to realize "zero carbon emission".

To complete these steps, you can't simply use some data to calculate. At this time, the earth system simulator comes in handy.

"Atlas" can comprehensively consider the current components of the earth, especially the impact of the evolution in the ecosystem on the climate. This is similar to the American "Biosphere II" mentioned at the beginning. They all simulate an environment to study climate change, but the research scope of "Atlas" is wider.

Besides, have you noticed that extreme weather events caused by global warming are increasing recently? Typhoon, rainstorm, drought and hot and cold temperatures, even sometimes, it rains heavily in the next city, but we are sunny. This sudden change of weather is the problem of global warming.

We can't control these extreme weather, but we can make predictions, just like the weather forecast.

However, as we all know, the weather forecast is almost unreliable, but the high-performance computing equipped with Atlas will provide strong support for its data calculation. With its super high computing power, the spatial resolution of the model can be improved. In other words, "Atlas" can accurately predict extreme weather and climate events, and use its sophisticated model to capture weather signals more comprehensively, adding another fence for China's defense against extreme weather.

In addition, with the development of the world, the pollution caused by urbanization is becoming more and more serious. After the completion of Atlas, high-precision air pollution classification will be carried out, and the emission of chemical components in the atmosphere and metal simulation will be simulated, so as to trace the pollution sources.

In other words, we can find out which one is emitting pollutants by simulating the "map". If it can be built earlier, there will be no nuclear sewage near Fukushima.

In a word, "Atlas" will promote China's all-round scientific development, from exploring the secrets of the earth to controlling environmental pollution, but its appearance will definitely give us more say on global climate issues.

This year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has announced that the "Atlas" will be completed soon, which is not only our "great power", but also will bring more research on the ecological environment to all mankind.

The particularity of Atlas allows it to simulate the evolution history of the earth. The earth mentioned in the dinosaur era, the great voyage era and even tens of thousands of years later may be realized in Atlas. Let's look forward to its debut.