A Self-Evolving AI Agent System Accelerating the Understanding of Climate Change and Variability

A comprehensive understanding of Earth is essential to address climate change, but the fragmentation and explosive growth of data make it impossible for scientific discovery to keep pace with planetary change. We address this challenge by introducing EarthLink, the first AI “copilot” for Earth scientists that can automate the entire research process, enabling systematic, large-scale exploration across over 5 petabytes of cross-disciplinary data and more than 500 analytical tools. Evaluations based on over 900 expert scores demonstrate that EarthLink achieves performance comparable to junior scientists across core research tasks, including bias diagnosis and future climate projection. Crucially, while existing systems in other fields are often limited to textual reasoning or require human validation, we present the first demonstration of an AI autonomously formulating and verifying a novel physical mechanism. When tasked with the open-ended challenge of identifying Atlantic Niño precursors, EarthLink autonomously uncovered previously unrecognized drivers and formulated a physically interpretable mechanism. These results establish EarthLink as a robust AI-driven engine capable of generating original scientific insights previously thought exclusive to human cognition, paving the way for a fundamental shift in the pace and scale of Earth science research.