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Earth Simulator - StudentScholarships.org

On March 11 2002, Japanese engineers had built a computer so powerful that it could keep track of everything in the world all at once. It monitors rain forests in Bolivia, factories in Mexico, the Jet Stream, and the Gulf Stream. The Earth Simulator was designed to create a virtual twin of our home planet. Before this was made, the fastest computer in the world was an American military machine that can perform 7.2 trillion calculations per second. The simulator runs at more than 35 trillion calculations per second. The Earth Simulator was built in Yokohoma and is the size of four tennis courts. It is as powerful as the next twelve super computers in the world put together, and costs about $350 million. By plugging real-life climate data from satellites and ocean buoys into the Earth Simulator, researchers can create a computer model of the entire planet, then scroll it forward in time to see what will happen to our environment. Scientists have already completed a forecast of global ocean temperatures for the next 50 years, and a full set of climate predictions.

Instead of speculating about the possible environmental impact, the Kyoto accord, policymakers will be able to plug its parameters into the virtual Earth, then skip ahead 1,000 years to get a handle on what effect those policies might have. That kind of concrete data could