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Today, we find a large agenda of current and planned 

 programs of interdisciplinary breadth. These programs are vital 

 to the development of a more broadly based geosphere-biosphere 

 program in the 1990s. Among the examples worth special note are 

 the study of biogeochemical cycles undertaken by SCOPE, the ICSU 

 Special Committee on Problems of the Environment, which has been 

 concerned with the global cycles of carbon, sulfur, nitrogen and 

 phosphorous. This theme of biogeocheraistry is being examined 

 from the standpoint of space observations in NASA's "Global 

 Habitability Program". Other international programs close to 

 the concept of IGBP are the International Lithosphere Program 

 (ILP), the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) and the 

 International Solar-Terrestrial Physics Program (ISTP) to which 

 I have already referred. The WCRP embraces the World Ocean 

 Circulation Experiment (WOCE) designed to achieve quantitative 

 measures of the large scale circulation of the oceans and their 

 interactions with the atmosphere. WOCE is dependent upon major 

 satellite missions such as the Topography of the Ocean 

 Experiment (TOPEX) and the Geopotential Research Mission (GRM) 

 of the United States and the Earth Resources Satellite (ERS-1) 

 of ESA, as well as surface and subsurface observing platforms. 



It is important to recognize the long term monitoring 

 requirements for understanding of geosphere-biosphere 

 phenomena. To distinguish anthropogenic influences from natural 

 climate processes and to understand the mechanism involved in 



