The Nature

  Lithosphere The lithosphere contains the elements of the Earth crust and part of the upper mantle. This is the hard and rigid outer layer of the Earth. The term is taken from the Greek word  lithos  meaning “rocky”. This part of the Earth includes soil. The Earth’s lithosphere is made up of the crust and part of the upper mantle. Image:  Srimadhav  adapted from USGS, public domain. Biosphere The biosphere covers all living organisms on Earth. There is an estimated 20 million to 100 millions different species in the world organized into the 100 phyla that make up the five kingdoms of life forms. These organisms can be found in almost all parts of the geosphere. There are organisms in the air, soil, and water on Earth.

  Geographers break down the Earth’s systems into four spheres that make up the world’s air (atmosphere), water (hydrosphere), land (geosphere), and living organisms (biosphere). Three of these spheres are abiotic and one sphere is biotic. Abiotic describes substances that are made from non-living materials. Biotic relates to living things like bacteria, birds, mammals, insects, and plants. In this breakdown, all of the Earth’s water is included in the hydrosphere. This includes surface water (such as rivers, lakes, and oceans), water in the ground, ice and snow, and water in the atmosphere in the form of water vapor. Atmosphere The Earth’s atmosphere is the gaseous layer that envelopes the world. The commons term for the atmosphere is “air”. The Earth’s atmosphere is held around the planet by the force of gravity. The Earth’s atmosphere has five main layers and a sixth layer, the ionosphere, that overlaps the mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere. The bottom layer, whi...

  Plants and animals A selection of diverse  plant species A selection of diverse  animal species Originally  Aristotle  divided all living things between plants, which generally do not move fast enough for humans to notice, and animals. In  Linnaeus ' system, these became the  kingdoms   Vegetabilia  (later  Plantae ) and  Animalia . Since then, it has become clear that the Plantae as originally defined included several unrelated groups, and the  fungi  and several groups of  algae  were removed to new kingdoms. However, these are still often considered plants in many contexts. Bacterial life is sometimes included in flora, and some classifications use the term bacterial flora separately from plant flora. Among the many ways of classifying plants are by regional  floras , which, depending on the purpose of study, can also include fossil flora, remnants of plant life from a previous era....

Nature , in the broadest sense, is the natural, physical, or material world or  universe . "Nature" can refer to the  phenomena  of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of  science . Although humans are part of nature, human activity is often understood as a separate category from other natural phenomena. The word nature is derived from the  Latin  word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and in ancient times, literally meant "birth". In ancient philosophy, Natura is mostly used as the Latin translation of the Greek word  physis  , which originally related to the intrinsic characteristics that plants, animals, and other features of the world develop of their own accord. The concept of nature as a whole, the physical  universe , is one of several expansions of the original notion;