The project called Destination Earth is a highly ambitious attempt by scientists from the European Union to model future climate trends and help prepare for potentially catastrophic events.The project also aims to help efforts to become carbon neutral by 2050 and is expected to run for the next 10 years.
“Destination Earth (DestinE) will contribute to the European Commission’s Green Deal and Digital Strategy,” states the press release.
“It will unlock the potential of digital modelling of the Earth’s physical resources and related phenomena such as climate change, water / marine environments, polar areas and the cryosphere, etc. on a global scale to speed up the green transition and help plan for major environmental degradation and disasters.”
In order to create Earth’s digital twin , scientists will be utilizing cloud-based systems and supercomputers to pull a wide amount of computational power. The challenge is that there is a lack of computers in the world that have the raw modeling power to host a model of Earth to a 1- kilometer resolution.
This makes the EU join the digital race with the leading world superpowers to develop supercomputers capable of over one billion calculations per second (called an exascale computer). This will be largely helped by an €8 billion investment into supercomputers, which was given in September 2020.
