Ranger Sarah views the Grand Canyon. The story of the formation of the Grand Canyon begins almost two billion years ago with the formation of the igneous and metamorphic rocks of the inner gorge. Above these old rocks lie layer upon layer of sedimentary rock, each telling a unique part of the environmental history of the Grand Canyon region.
Ranger Sarah view the snow covered Bryce Canyon. After the rock was laid down, uplift began as the he Farallon Plate was forced underneath the North American Plate. Over the last several million years the Farallon plate began to break apart allowing heat to rise and elevate the Colorado Plateau to its current height.
Ranger Sarah with another spectacular view. The uplifted Bryce’s rocks eventually reached the “goldilocks zone” - the perfect elevation for the forces of nature to create Bryce’s hoodoos. Now weathering and erosion can go to work.
2024 marks 200 years since William Buckland reported his research on Megalosaurus, later recognised as the first non-avian dinosaur genus to be formally named ...
I teach the first course in the first term of the first year here in the Earth Science major at UNSW.
I informally find out about the student's interests in 'Earth and Environmental Science'. Increasingly I hear the oceans, the environmental. Volcanoes, meteorites and minerals are constantly popular. Students interested in mining and extractive industries are a very small percentage of the group. Which is a problem if we are to transition to a green economy and need critical minerals for that.
Here's a thought provoking article with three trajectories for geoscience. Figure 2 is worth a look - if you are an educator in the subject, are you and your colleagues on H1 (old school) or H2?
> Geoscience, along with other scientific disciplines, is being increasingly challenged on how it can best confront key global challenges, such as climate change, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, human conflict and migration, and persistent poverty. But its traditional association with exploitation of the planet’s natural resources for energy and materials links it with contemporary concerns around unsustainable human practices, arguably fueling a growing disenchantment that is most evident in declining enrollment in university geoscience courses in many countries. Therefore, a fresh re-framing of the geoscience’s relationship to society would seem to be urgently needed. In response to this need, we introduce the “Three Horizons” concept for visualizing paradigm change in complex systems as a tool to explore how the future global geoscientific mission might be re-imagined. Using this conceptual framework, we consider three parallel pathways – “business as usual” (horizon 1), “entrepreneurial” (horizon 2) and “visionary” (horizon 3)—that offer alternative narrative trajectories for how geoscience and geoscientists might serve society’s grand challenges.