Studying Earth - Real-life applications
The Scientific Method
As discussed later, the scientific method emerged during the seventeenth century and has remained in use ever since. It is a way of looking at facts and data, and its application is what truly separates science from nonscience. Nonscientific "theories" postulate answers based not on evidence but on pure conjecture, a habit of mind that was widespread before the development of the scientific method and is still all too common. A contemporary example would be the claim that intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms built the great pyramids of Egypt.
The only real basis for this belief is the fact that the pyramids are extremely sophisticated architectural achievements for a civilization that had no metal tools, no wheel, and virtually no understanding of geometry, as was the case in Egypt in about 2500 B.C. But is a huge conceptual leap to go from the observation of these anomalies to the claim that visitors from outer space built the pyramids. The same is true of other strange artifacts from ancient or prehistoric times, such as the great structures of Stonehenge in England or the Nazca lines in South America. They are curious, puzzling, and intriguing, and it may be fun to speculate about engineers from another world—but such speculation is not science. (For more about the methodological distinctions between science and its opposite, see Earth, Science, and Nonscience.)
It is no mistake that here we are talking about the application of the scientific method to something outside the "hard sciences," the study of the pyramids being the province of social sciences, such as archaeology and history. In fact, the method has had just as much impact in those areas as it has in the physical and biological sciences. The scientific method (along with the closely related philosophical principles of basic logic, handed down from the ancient Greeks) can be applied in many aspects of daily life, enabling a person to make sense of a complex world. Many of the controversies of the modern world, including those involving race, sex, religion, and politics, could be treated more constructively if people approached the topics with a genuine interest in understanding the facts rather than simply finding confirmation for their emotionally based preconceived notions.
APPLYING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.
Scientists rigorously applying the scientific method begin their quest for understanding by looking solely at the facts that can be garnered by observation. On the basis of these data, they form hypotheses, or unproven statements regarding observed phenomena. This is usually as far as many people go in their thinking, and it is not far enough: up to this point, for instance, the theory that claims that visitors from another planet built the pyramids is in accordance with the scientific method. But such fanciful notions, as well as kindred ideas, such as conspiracy theories, never go to the next step, which marks the dividing line between science and pure opinion.
Having formed a hypothesis, the scientist subjects it to testing, the most critical component of the scientific method. By contrast, advocates of nonscientific ideas (which, of course, usually pose as scientific ideas) typically focus on searching for evidence that will confirm the hypothesis. Anything that supports the hypothesis is reported; anything that does not is simply ignored. By
If a hypothesis withstands enough repeated testing, it acquires the status of a theory, or a more general statement about nature. If the idea embodied in a theory is shown to be the case in every situation for which it is tested, it then becomes a law. The process is a bit like that involved in making metal stronger: the more abuse it endures, assuming it is able to recover, the more impervious it will be to further abuse. But every type of metal has its limits, a threshold of compression or tension beyond which it cannot retain its original shape, and likewise it is possible that a scientific law can be overturned. For this reason, all laws are subject to continual testing, and if a test disproves a scientific law, this opens the way for the development of a new paradigm.
The Historical Roots of the Earth Sciences
The earth sciences are both old and new. On the one hand, they address matters of fundamental importance to human beings, and for this reason, the rudiments of the earth sciences probably made their appearance before any of the other fields of scientific study except perhaps astronomy. From prehistoric times, societies have been concerned with obtaining metals from the ground to make tools and weapons, finding water to support human life and crops, and discerning the future of weather patterns that could greatly affect conditions for human populations. Thus were born, respectively, the geologic, hydrologic, and atmospheric sciences.
Much of what took place in the earth sciences before about 1800, however, was a matter of superstition, legend, guesswork, and a smattering of real science. Much of it was dominated by religious belief, which relied on a strict interpretation of the Bible. Based on the amount of time that elapsed between Adam and Jesus, combined with the fact that Genesis 1 states that Adam was created at the end of the first week of Earth's existence, the Catholic Church maintained that the planet could not possibly be more than a few thousand years old. (For more on this subject, see Earth, Science, and Nonscience.)
THE ANCIENT EARTH SCIENCES.
Despite the many impediments to scientific study in ancient times, a few thinkers contributed significantly to our knowledge. For instance, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C. ) discovered that Earth is a sphere by noting the rounded shadow on the Moon during a lunar eclipse. His pupil, Theophrastus (372?-287? B.C. ), wrote a highly competent work, Concerning Stones, that remained a guide to mineralogy for two millennia. A few centuries later, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes of Cyrene ( ca. 276- ca. 194 B.C. ) made an astoundingly accurate measurement of Earth's circumference.
Much of what passed for science, however, was little more than entertaining, anecdotal misinformation. Such is the case, for instance, in the Historia Naturalis (Natural history) of the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder ( A.D. 23-79), a work that, despite its many flaws, remained widely respected through the Renaissance. As for Eratosthenes' measurement of Earth, the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy ( ca. A.D. 100-170) rejected it in favor of a much smaller, much less correct figure. Thus, Ptolemy may deserve some of the credit for discovering the New World: if Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) had known just how far it was around Earth, he might not have been so confident about sailing off into the seas to the west of Europe.
Ptolemy's rejection of Eratosthenes's measurement was far from his only negative contribution to the history of science. Influenced by highly misguided concepts handed down from Aristotle himself (see Earth, Science, and Nonscience), he developed a complex cosmology that depicted Earth as the center of the universe. By this he meant that Earth was the center of the solar system, because up until a few centuries ago, astronomers believed that space consisted only of Earth, Sun, Moon, the five planets visible to the naked eye, and the "fixed stars" in the night sky.
DAWN OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.
What made Ptolemy's cosmology so complex, of course, was the fact that Earth is not anywhere near the center of the universe, and therefore his system required intricate mathematical acrobatics to remain workable. This posed little problem during the early Middle Ages, when learning in Europe all but ceased, and even in the much more scientifically progressive Muslim world of that time, Ptolemy's word remained virtual holy writ. By the late Middle Ages, however, as scientific learning returned to Europe, thinkers began to notice increasing difficulties in using his system.
The watershed event in what became known as the Scientific Revolution was the proof, by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), that Earth and the other planets of the solar system revolve around the Sun. By that point, the Catholic Church had given its official approval to Ptolemy's geocentric model, because it comported well with the idea that God had created humankind in his own image to fulfill a specific destiny. Therefore, Copernicus's challenge to established teachings proved highly controversial, and the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) would be forced to recant his support of it or face punishment by death.
Yet Galileo paved the way for the full acceptance of Copernicus's work and for the Scientific Revolution that followed in its wake. His theories and experiments concerning gravitational acceleration greatly influenced the English natural philosopher Isaac Newton (1642-1727), leading to the latter's epochal work on gravitation and motion. But at least as important as Galileo's work was his methodology: Galileo virtually introduced the scientific method, providing a set of principles for systematic study.
The Foundations of Modern Geology
The scientific method had an enormous impact on all the sciences. Unlike earlier "scientific" principles, which were built on the teachings of religious prophets or the uninformed conjecture of philosophers, this one was established on a foundation of observation, and it opened the way for unprecedented progress in the sciences.
Until late in the eighteenth century, however, the relatively young field of geology centered primarily on mere observation rather than the development of theories. Thus, the discipline was not all that different from what it had been in ancient times, or when the Anglo-Saxon historian known as the Venerable Bede (673-735) coined the term geology. The latter term, a combination of the Greek geo and logia, means "study of Earth," and was intended to distinguish such pursuits from theology, or the study of heavenly things.
HISTORICAL AND PHYSICAL GEOLOGY.
In modern times, geology is defined as the study of the solid earth, in particular, its rocks, minerals, fossils, and land formations. As for Bede's putative opposition between geology and theology, it would become more pronounced in the period from about 1500 to 1800, as the findings of geologists began increasingly to contradict the teachings in the biblical book of Genesis. Among the first to consider the age of Earth in scientific terms, rather than by recourse to the Scriptures, was one of the world's greatest thinkers: the Italian scientist and artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who speculated that fossils might have been made by the remains of long-dead animals.
Less famous was Leonardo's German contemporary Georgius Agricola (1494-1555), the "father of mineralogy," who wrote extensively on mining, metallurgy, and minerals. Together, these two men represent the two principal strains of geology: historical geology, or the study of Earth's history, and physical geology. The latter discipline, of which Agricola was a key representative, is concerned with the material components of Earth and with the forces that have shaped the planet. All the areas of geology discussed here fall under one of those two headings.
Most of the important developments in geology during the period from 1500 to 1800 fall under the heading of historical geology, beginning with a key observation on strata, or layers of rock, made by the Danish geologist Nicolaus Steno (1638-1687). As Steno correctly hypothesized, the lower a layer of rock lies, the earlier the historical period it represents. These observations, later developed into a theory by the German geologist Johann Gottlob Lehmann (1719-1767), had several implications.
First of all, the ideas of Steno and Lehmann provided geologists with a method for dating the age of rock formations not unlike the rings observed by dendrochronologists studying the biography of a tree. As a result of study based on these findings, scientists were confronted with the growing realization that Earth is much, much older than a strict interpretation of the Bible would suggest. This finding, in turn, led to the first theories concerning the shaping of Earth and thus to the foundation of geology as a modern scientific discipline.
THREE IMPORTANT SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT.
In the wake of this breakthrough, at least three schools of thought developed. One of them, catastrophism, centered around the foregone conclusion that Earth had been created in six literal days or, at the very least, in an extremely short time, through a series of catastrophes. Opposed to this view was the Neptunist stratigraphy of the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner (1750-1817), who maintained that Earth had been shaped by a vast ocean (hence the name Neptune ) that once covered its entire surface. Finally, there was the Plutonist school of the Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726-1797). Named after the Greek god of the underworld, this theory held that volcanoes and other disturbances beneath Earth's surface had been the principal forces in shaping the planet.
Hutton's theory would prevail, and today he is regarded as the father of modern geology. In Theory of the Earth (1795), he introduced one of the key concepts underlying the study of the planet's history, the principle of uniformitarianism—the idea that the forces at work on Earth today have always been in operation and are the same ones that shaped it. Nonetheless, Neptunism and even catastrophism had their merits. Although Werner and his followers were incorrect, Neptunism was the first well-developed theory concerning Earth's origins and helped pave the way for others.
As for the advocates of catastrophism, they were correct inasmuch as they noted the role of sudden catastrophes in shaping the planet. These catastrophes (for instance, a comet about 66 million years ago, which may have destroyed the dinosaurs), however, can be explained within the framework of a very old Earth. Nor does the fact of the catastrophes themselves in any way suggest a planet that is only a few thousand years old.
LATER DEVELOPMENTS.
As noted earlier, the later history of the earth sciences is discussed more properly within the context of specific subjects. Instead, our focus here is on the array of disciplines that proliferated alongside geology and on the need for a disciplinary paradigm larger than that of geology alone. By the mid-twentieth century, the range of disciplines involved in the study of Earth had become so complex and varied that it was a major achievement when the English geologist Arthur Holmes (1890-1965) developed a model that incorporated most of them. Holmes's system was not simply a "model" in the way that the term typically is used; Holmes also constructed a literal diagram that enabled students to visualize the relationships between subdisciplines.
Holmes's model was concerned primarily with the solid earth sciences, or the geologic sciences, meaning that it did not include the hydrologic sciences. Within its purview, however, it used a method of classification so broad (yet still targeted) that it has been adapted in recent years to include subdisciplines developed since Holmes's time. These changes serve to emphasize further the evolving nature of what came to be known as the earth sciences. The latter term came into use only during the 1960s and 1970s, when it became apparent that neither geology alone nor even a combination of geology, geophysics, and geochemistry could encompass all the areas of study devoted to Earth.
Overview of the Earth Sciences
Throughout most of what remains of this essay, we very briefly sketch the outlines of the earth sciences. It should be reiterated that the organizational system used here is not necessarily definitive and is intended only to provide the reader with a general idea as to how the various earth sciences fit together.
GEOLOGY.
At the core of the earth sciences, of course, is geology itself, which focuses on the study of the solid earth. As noted earlier, geology can be subdivided into historical and physical geology. The principle subdisciplines of historical geology are as follows.
- Stratigraphy: the study of rock layers, or strata, beneath Earth's surface
- Geochronology: the study of Earth's age and the dating of specific formations in terms of geologic time
- Sedimentology: the study and interpretation of sediments, including sedimentary processes and formations
- Paleontology: the study of fossilized plants and animals, or flora and fauna
- Paleoecology: the study of the relationship between prehistoric plants and animals and their environments.
Note that there are several other disciplines referred to by the prefix paleo- (or palaeo- ), Greek for "very old." Two of the more well-known ones are paleobiology and paleobotany, but the subdisciplines can become very specialized, as evidenced by the existence of a field known as paleobiogeography, or the study of fossils' geographic distribution. The principle sub-disciplines of physical geology are:
- Geomorphology: the study of landforms and of the forces and processes that have shaped them
- Structural geology: the study of rock structures, shapes, and positions in Earth's interior
- Mineralogy: the study of minerals (crystalline structures that make up rocks), which includes several smaller subdisciplines, such as crystallography
- Petrology: the study of rocks, which is divided into several smaller subdisciplines, most notably igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary petrology
- Economic geology: the study of fuels, metals, and other materials from Earth that are of interest to industry or the economy in general
- Environmental geology: the study of the geologic impact of both natural and human activity on the environment.
It should be noted that there is some overlap between historical and physical geology. For instance, sedimentology often is placed under the heading of physical geology, while some sources include a third category of subdisciplines that overlap both historical and physical geology.
OTHER GEOLOGIC SCIENCES.
Geology occupies a central place among the geologic sciences or geosciences, but also important are those disciplines and subdisciplines formed, as Holmes pointed out, at the intersections between geology and astronomy, physics, and chemistry, respectively. (Some sources, on the other hand, consider these disciplines to be a part of geology itself. In the present context, the term geologic sciences is used to encompass not only geology but also these related areas of study.)
Planetary science applies the earth sciences paradigm to other planets. Among its important subdisciplines is astrogeology or planetary geology, or the study of the rock record on the Moon, the planets, and other bodies. Also significant is cosmology, the study of the origin, structure, and evolution of the universe, which often is treated as part of astronomy.
Geophysics, or an application of physics to the study of Earth, occupies a position of prominence within the earth sciences. Among the areas it addresses are the production, expenditure, and transmission of energy within Earth as well as the planet's magnetic, electric, and gravitational properties. Geophysics encompasses such areas as geodesy, the science of measuring Earth's shape and gravitational field. Seismology, or the study of the waves produced by earthquakes and volcanoes, is another important part of geophysics. (On the other hand, volcanology, or the study of volcanoes themselves, would fall more properly under physical geology.)
Geochemistry, which is concerned with the chemical properties and processes of Earth, covers a wide array of natural phenomena—from radioactive isotopes in the ground to life-forms in the biosphere. Under the heading of geochemistry fall several biogeochemical processes, such as the carbon cycle, whose study brings together aspects of the physical sciences geology and chemistry as well as various life sciences.
OTHER EARTH SCIENCES.
The hydrological sciences are concerned with the hydrosphere and its principal component, water. These disciplines include hydrology, the study of the water cycle; glaciology, the study of ice in general and glaciers in particular; and oceanography. Clearly, oceanography overlaps with the life sciences; likewise, hydrogeology (the study of groundwater), as its name implies, overlaps with geology.
The atmospheric sciences, obviously, are devoted to the atmosphere. Most notable among these sciences is meteorology, the study of weather patterns, and climatology, the study of temperature and climate. (Paleoclimatology is an important subdiscipline of historical geology.) The atmospheric sciences also are concerned with phenomena ranging from pollution to the optical effects created by the interaction of the Sun's rays with the atmosphere.
Finally, there are miscellaneous areas of study that either are interdisciplinary or cross boundaries between the earth sciences and the social sciences. In the former category, for instance, would be environmental studies that involve aspects of the biosphere, atmosphere, geosphere, and hydrosphere. Examples of the second category are paleoarchaeology, the study of the earliest humans and humanoid forms, and, of course, geography. Also included in this group are such intriguing areas as urban geology, a branch of environmental geology concerned with human settlements.
WHERE TO LEARN MORE
Allaby, Ailsa, and Michael Allaby. A Dictionary of Earth Sciences. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Athro: Your Source for High School and College Level Biology, Earth Science, and Geology on the Web (Web site). <http://www.athro.com/> .
Cox, Reg, and Neil Morris. The Natural World. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.
Dasch, E. Julius. Earth Sciences for Students. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1999.
Geology Entrance (Web site). <http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/exhibit/geology.html> .
Hancock, Paul L., and Brian J. Skinner. The Oxford Companion to the Earth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Illustrated Glossary of Geologic Terms (Web site). <http://www.geology.iastate.edu/new_100/glossary.html> .
Jobs in Earth Sciences (Web site). <http://geology.com/jobs.htm> .
Knapp, Brian J., David Woodroffe, and Julian Baker. Earth Science: Discovering the Secrets of the Earth. Danbury, CT: Grolier Educational, 2000.
Skinner, Brian J., Stephen C. Porter, and Daniel B. Botkin. The Blue Planet: An Introduction to Earth System Science. 2d ed. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999.
Stace, Alexa. Atlas of Earth. Milwaukee, WI: Gareth Stevens Publishing, 2000.
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