Research in any field of Earth sciences and beyond requires both, accounting for the evolution of past knowledge into our scientific heritage and a conceptual framework underpinning the actual set of case studies. Development of concepts, based on established and renewed paradigms, essentially determines the set of methods to apply and, accordingly, the potentials and limitations of generated data as well as their interpretation. Hence, conceptual and methodological considerations go both prior to and beyond case studies and ask for tools from various fields such as scale transfer approaches, feedbacks between triggers and processes, evolution of complexity and non-linearity, inversion of measured, observation-derived data to processes and vice versa.

This session aims to bring together people with an interest in current concepts and their historical foundations, people that pursue the relationships between observation and interpretation and the limitations that they may introduce into our work. In this overarching session we welcome contributions from any field of Earth science research that focus on conceptual topics and the evolution of ideas, may it be through presentations of new techniques, methodological advances, (re-)evaluations of established paradigms or comparisons of apparently contradicting opinions.