The GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences is the national research centre for Earth sciences. Research at the GFZ focuses on the geosphere within the highly complex System Earth with its further subsystems, its interacting subcycles, and its wide network of cause-and-effect chains. This we do in a close interdisciplinary collaboration with the related scientific disciplines physics, mathematics, chemistry, and biology as well as with the engineering sciences disciplines of rock mechanics, engineering hydrology and seismology.