Q:

What graphics program to use to make 3D scientific illustrations for journal articles?

I am trying to plot a 3D figure for scientific illustration. Does anyone knows the software type to use to plot graphic illustration such as 

I would like to reproduced some parts of this figure and add some features as well!
Thanks
GH

A:

The shortest way to make a replica is to have all needed items as high resolution photos, drawings or rendered 3D models. Low res screenshots are probably useless because there must be some resolution reserve for transformations. 
Everything must already have the right viewing angle, it cannot be modified substantially in 2D. Mirroring and scaling are possible, rotation and skewing give easily unnatural results when the subject is a 3D object in a photo.
There are some black curves which can easily be drawn. But you will need to draw much more. There's many items which must be "background removed" You must draw clipping paths to extract the items.
You must also draw the curved frame of all items, the bowl and the borders between the materials.
You must warp some items to make them fit better against each other.
Some needed photos:

shimmering sea
a windmill and the other floating tower on the sea
a piece of a city
a nuclear power plant
green areas
the bluff between the beach and green area
beach
foaming waves near the shoreline
textures for the bedrock and sand
detail image of the cables

Not asked, but if you are going to publish something which contains other images, you need proper license to use the images. Simply copying what you happen to find can cause troubles, even lawsuits or your work stays unpublished, because the publisher do not take a risk.
All composing work can be done in Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity Photo or other multilayer bitmap image drawing program which allows transparency,  masking, clipping, layer blending modes, warping, basic color adjustments, solid color fills, gradient fills and drawing highly regular bezier curves as clipping or masking edges and also visible paths.
A competent illustrator can compose this in Adobe Illustrator. Everything can be also a 3D model, but the task is gigantic, so I recommend Photoshop or other bitmap program.
You must learn to handle all mentioned Photoshop methods reliably to get the wanted result. 
If you expect someone will show here how to make the replica, you want too much. But some detail in the process can be a reasonable question. If you knock your head to an obstacle when you do the work, you can well show what you have got and ask, how to get over or around. 
Please, do not forget to show, what you have already done, if you ask some details. Questions "I want to know how this is done!" will collect here downvotes and have a tendency to get closed.

