The millennium-old Chinese calendar system, i.e. the 72 pentads system, which traditionally marks seasonal shifts and guides agricultural production, possesses untapped potential for mitigating climate change-exacerbated geological disasters. The intensification of the ground-breathing effect - cyclical soil expansion and contraction due to climate change - heightens disaster risk, yet its dynamics remain poorly understood. In this study, the evolutionary patterns and mechanisms of ground breathing are traced through the lens of the 72 pentads. Through three years of continuous high-resolution monitoring on China's Loess Plateau, a previously undocumented "heat-induced contraction and coldinduced expansion" deformation pattern in loess soils was identified, significantly distinct from conventional freeze-thaw responses. Quantitative analyses further distinguish the irreversible deformation component, revealing its significant cumulative contribution of approximately 28.4% to long-term ground subsidence, predominantly driven by soil energy transfer, moisture redistribution, and phase transitions. The 72 pentads scientifically mirror the dynamic interactions of matter and energy between the land surface and atmosphere, serving as an innovative temporal marker for analyzing groundbreathing processes. By integrating the traditional 72-pentad ecological calendar with a long shortterm memory-based artificial intelligence model, this research demonstrates superior predictive accuracy in reconstructing historical ground deformation trends compared to Gregorian calendar-based models. This study creatively bridges millennium-old phenological wisdom with modern geotechnical monitoring, filling a critical knowledge gap and offering a novel predictive framework for identifying and mitigating climate-driven geological hazards in the Loess Plateau and similar climate-sensitive regions globally. (c) 2026 Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).