Category: End of year summaries, general musings

As in previous years, the landmark developments in 2002 chosen by editorial staff of major journals sideline the Earth sciences.  Both Nature and Science consider the discovery of Sahelanthropus tchadensis the only geoscientific advance worthy of a headline (See Bonanza time for Bonzo in Earth Pages News of August 2002).  Scientific misconduct tops Nature’s list, the exposure of monumental fudging by physicists Jan Hendrick Schön and Victor Ninov being something which should concern every scientist.  Molecular biology was, unsurprisingly, the front runner for both august periodicals, with issues related to terrorism, climate change and the soon-forgotten World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg appearing in both.  Jo’burg received typically trenchant comment from water specialist Fred Pearce in New Scientist, particularly about the weasel phrase “sustainable development” – read “make money”, according to Pearce.  New Scientist’s main look forward to 2003 is Oliver Morton’s perspective on ESA’s Mars Express, which carries the British Beagle 2 miniature life-sniffing lab, and the two NASA Mars rovers scheduled for launch this year.  This is big-budget science, yet carries big risks, judging from the frequency with which giga-dollar missions ended up in flames or the sea recently.  Morton pours scorn on the hype that Mars missions will solve “great mysteries” on which their funding depends – and that of the agencies who launch them.

Anyone who has the brass neck to comment month by month on geoscientific news cannot resist picking developments that most marked the year, so here is my own personal choice.

The most exciting advances were in palaeoanthropology: March (Taking stock of hominid evolution), April (Homo erectus unification?), April (Phyllogeography and “Out of Africa”), August (Bonanza time for Bonzo), November (A considered view) , December (Central Asian Y chromosomes and the source of migrating humans)

Most hammered hypothesis: “Snowball Earth” came in for some stick in February (Meltdown for Snowball Earth?) and December (Snowball Earth hypothesis challenged, again).  Running that a close second was the BLAG hypothesis that subduction metamorphism is a source for CO₂ recycling: December (Deep carbon cycling, and gold mineralization)

Biggest technological advances: April (Satellite-based gravitational surveys), October (Microgravity and diamonds); August (Tungsten and Archaean heavy bombardment), September (Very early differentiation of planetary bodies).  The most important technical consolidation was in seismic tomography: May (Mantle motions from seismic tomography), August (Seismic tomography and the African superplume), this issue (Beowulf and mapping the mantle)

Most connective research: November (The lost world of the Galápagos hotspot track), linking plume activity, Pacific and Caribbean tectonics, closure of the Central American climatic “door”, and intercontinental migration of flora and fauna.

The biggest slanging match: April (Doubt cast on earliest bacterial fossils).

The greatest scandal emerged in autumn 2002: October (British Geological Survey sued over arsenic), December (More confusion over Bangladesh arsenic crisis)

March saw hopefully the last word on the influence of extraterrestrial impact on the K-T mass extinction (Extinctions by impacts: smoking artillery) when the fullerenes in the K-T boundary layer were matched with those in carbonaceous chondrites.

Lesser categories: Biggest scam: August (Exploration licence lepton by physicists).  Most amusing discovery: November (Dinosaurs did urinate). Latest frightener: May (Magnetic reversal on the way?)  Most promising palaeontological theory: September (The Malnourished Earth hypothesis – evolutionary stasis in the mid-Proterozoic)

Amid the desperate search for classical names to lend weight to the study of asteroids palaeotectonic features, and even theories of the Earth system, there has been one particularly unfortunate choice.

Gaia (Earth) emerged from Chaos, the great void of emptiness within the universe.  She gave birth to Uranus (Sky), apparently by some form of parthenogenesis.  Their incestuous coupling produced the 3 Cyclopes, 3 Hecatoncheires and the 12 Titans. Uranus was a bad father and husband. He particularly hated the Hecatoncheires (they had 100 arms and 50 heads each), and stuck them deep within Gaia’s womb causing her to plot against him.  To rid herself of Uranus she begged her children to kill him. All refused apart from the youngest child, Chronos (Time and the father of Zeus).  Gaia made Chronos a flint sickle, which he used to castrate his father and threw his testicles into the sea.  From the spilt blood came the Giants, the Ash Tree Nymphs and the Erinnyes.  When Uranus’ severed genitalia landed in the sea, foam bubbled around them. From this foam sprang Aphrodite (meaning foam-born), Goddess of Love.

This doesn’t quite tally with the eponymous hypothesis, but seems to have a more realistic ring for what we know about Earth history.

Source: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~u9dam/myth/immortals/

2001 was the year of the human genome, stem cells and carnage in the USA and Britain delivered by self-justifying fanatics and the agricultural wing of government respectively.  It ends with serious inroads into basic freedoms of expression and privacy in the wake of violence.  Both 11^th September and the British foot and mouth epidemic feature prominently in the authoritative end-year reviews by both Science (v. 294, p. 2446-2447) and Nature (v.  414, p. 836-841).  It is hardly surprising that Earth science, bar comments on climate change, has no entry to rank with downturns in science budgets, development of neural circuitry, high-temperature superconductivity, bio-molecular chips, the unending hunt for the neutrino, adventures with the Large Hadron Collider and the farce of NASA’s Space Station .  Nonetheless, our progress has been marked by the sublime and the ridiculous, to a satisfying degree, as 2001 Earth Pages has tried to summarise.  No doubt its limitations have meant that some major advances have been missed, for which I apologise.  I leave it to readers to judge from the archive what were the highlights of the year.

In Britain, the last month has been one for either celebration or sober reflection by university academics, on announcement of the results of the latest round of the Research Assessment Exercise by HEFCE.  Science in general seems to have done rather too well over the last 5 years, for there is insufficient cash in the pot to suitably reward those departments whose rating has risen (Watson, A.  2001.  Universities raise their game, but the money doesn’t flow.  Science, v. 294, p. 2448-2449).  The £1.3 billion kitty to boost research infrastructure falls about £150 million short of the improved departments’ supposed expectations.  The board of HECFE is to tinker with the goalposts to eke out the dosh.  No doubt the well-endowed will benefit even further, the middle rankers getting less than their improvement ought to warrant, and then there are the also-rans.  In Earth sciences a financial squeeze ought not to have such an inequitable outcome as in more lab-dependent disciplines, but the whole exercise seems destined to result in marginalization of research topics into a dwindling bunch regarded as world-ranking.  That would be a recipe for a cut in diversity, that does not match the increasing need for breadth in getting to grips with processes in and history of the Earth System.

Returning, finally, to the events that have gripped the world for the last quarter of 2001, the central theme of most commentary is that the world changed on 11^th September.  I do not believe that it did.  For two thirds of the world’s population it is “business as usual” – an ever widening gap between hope for the future and expectation of any relief from poverty, disease and the fear of falling victim to natural and anthropogenic calamities that scientific advance might bring.  Despicable as the perpetrators and those who motivated their actions were, the attacks on the USA arose from the growing powerlessness of hundreds of millions of dispossessed people to secure their livelihoods and lives.  Global communications ensure that they are confronted daily by what they lack set against what is possible, leading to a deep sense of unfairness and perpetual victimhood   Scientists, whose work is enmeshed with emergence of the possible, should dwell on how they might help close that growing human fault line, rather than raging at or cringing before the monstrosity that they have helped to nurture.  Assisting the dispossessed to secure safe, dependable water supplies, to improve their agricultural yields, to rid themselves of endemic disease, to gain access to cheap energy and transportation, and above all to acquire knowledge and the ability to solve their own problems is not a problem of cosmological or genomic proportions.  It is a simple, human duty.

Robert Shackleton FRS died aged 91 on 3 May 2001. Shackleton’s long career began as a survey geologist in Africa.  After a period at Liverpool University he took up a chair at Leeds, and became an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Open University.  He was not a retiring man, and was of the school of which it was said, “The best geologist is the one who sees the most rocks”.   His peregrinations were legendary.  Shackleton’s forte was structural geology and tectonics, and he was a central figure in driving forward our understanding of Africa’s evolution.  Sadly, he did not live to witness the publication of his Geology of Africa project.  His touch and his flair were felt by many throughout the world, and they will be missed.

Earth science competes for space in both the prestigious scientific journals, Nature and Science, and the popular science press with the rest of the sciences.  2000 AD was the year of the genome (human and watercress), nanobots, AIDS in Africa, the quark-gluon plasma of the Big Bang, killer proteins and stem cells.  In Nature’s review of the year (2000 in context.  Nature, v. 408, 21/28 December 2000 issue, p. 894-904), only water on Mars and global warming figured as aspects of Earth science with “big-push-forward” status.  No doubt Science will conclude much the same, in the manner of the Time-Newsweek topic tracking.

The 2000 AD issues of Earth Pages have shown that, even in the pages of the “Big Two”, Earth scientists  from many branches have had that wider impact that heads everyone’s wish list, but one that continues to dwindle in proportion to other headlining subject areas.

A publication in Nature or Science is today a waving Papuan head-dress, not just a feather in a researcher’s cap.  An item in News and Views or Perspectives, provoked by their publication, is the nearest Earth scientists ever come to a Nobel Prize, for the eponymous pyrotechnician eschewed the breadth of our discipline.  Well, perhaps not the ultimate “gong”, but definitely an accolade that did not stem from incestuous back slapping.

My personal Hogmanay thought, in the run-up to the odd “cup of kindness”, is a bit depressing.  If a department that inwardly congratulates itself – probably about now in its end of year festivities – on the quality and quantity of its research neither features in News and Views, nor in the popular-science press, does it really have any status?  It seems no longer enough to pursue “scholarship” for its own, self-defined sake, as if it ever was.  Without more effort to raise awareness, in the widest sense, of Earth science’s relevance, much of it risks being sidelined.  Whose interest do we serve now, and how should we foster wider impact beyond the Disneyesque view of the K-T boundary and that of the damp anorak seen dimly in the mist?

Comments welcomed!  Maybe Earth Pages should open a discussion on “branding” in the New Year.