Towards a Global Geoscience Initiative – GSA 2009 Town Hall Meeting

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Meeting Summary

GSA Town Hall Meeting: Tuesday 20 October 2009 at 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm, Oregon Convention Center, Room B116, Portland, Oregon

Chairs: Edmund Nickless (Geological Society of London) and Jack Hess (Geological Society of America)

Speakers:

• Suzette Kimball (Acting Director, US Geological Survey) — There Be DRAGONs: Delta Science in the 21st Century
• Murray Hitzman (Charles F. Fogarty Professor of Economic Geology, Colorado School of Mines) — Critical Research Challenges in Natural Resource Geosciences for the Early 21st Century
• John Ludden (Executive Director, British Geological Survey) — Applied Geosciences for Planet Earth

In an hour long discussion following the three presentations, during which approximately 20 people were present representing a cross section of employment sectors and age, no one said that we should not be pursuing this initiative.

Points made include:

• Globally the challenge is the interface of food, water, and energy security.
• Is there a global geoscientific project which would command public interest?
• The challenge is adapting to and mitigating environmental change in a resource poor future coupled with sustainability.
• How can the geosciences be brought into the development of policy and to the attention of government?
• Prediction depends on integrated science.
• We will need to work with social scientists in communicating the message and in identifying socially acceptable action.
• Hazards attract attention but what is the excitement in earth observation? 3-D modelling of the Earth through time provides a challenge of scale – kilometres to nanometres.
• Remote sensing techniques can be linked to monitoring and sustainability.
• Can this initiative be grouped around ‘spaceship earth’ – a journey or ‘mission earth’ – make the earth a better place to live on. What are the indicators of quality? Reference this and say for example – “This is the best place for this desired human activity”.
• In terms of status how do we move away from conspicuous consumption as an indicator? What is the role of the citizen – can we identify a topic which is engaging – citizen science as an observer, reporter of change?
• On oceans and atmosphere, what has been done and what remains to do? Food, water and energy security will be pressing topics over the next forty years. What do the public understand about long-term sustainability?
• Potential focus of an initiative might be fluids in the subsurface or the use of the geosphere.

Specific issues are:

• Population growth,
• Communication,
• Difficulties of getting academics aligned in their priorities,
• Initiating measures of public engagement, and
• Involving the public in observational experiments – citizen science.

Edmund Nickless and P. Patrick Leahy 06 January 2010

Presentations