Why Study Environmental Geology?
What is Environ-mental Geology all about?
/Environmental Geology is the study of human interactions with earth environment, hazards and resources.
Continuing population growth implies concomitant growth in the demands on our natural resourcesand habitat, so stressing the environment. Thomas Malthus thus argued in a June 1798 essaythat thepower of population greatly exceeds the power of the nature to sustain it. Indeed, the world population, a little under
/1 billion at that time, now exceeds 6 billion. Ordinarily, this should have increased poverty, pestilence and strife. But the world economy, about 1 trillion 1990$ then, is now about 40
trillion $. Technology, not available when Malthus made his predict-tion, has clearly helped! But the environmental stress attendant to population growth has now created a catch-22 paradox: in a closed
/The paradox of technology
geoenvironmental system of finite natural resources,population growth raises the demand for nature’s bounties, so enhancing environmental stress, but the resulting recourse to technology only aggravates this stress. Following are some of the observed trends:
- Since the 1970s, natural disasters have accountedfor two-thirds of thedisaster-related fatalities worldwidealthough, contrary to the common perception, they have mostly come from sources other than earthquakes and volcanism (see the pie chart below).
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Indeed, technology may well have helped here, e.g., instead of reflecting population’s exponential growth, earthquake fatalities have been steadily declining!
These fatalities have devastated the poor or economically underdeveloped countries more than the economically developed countries that are better equipped to cope with the resulting effect of property losses. Disaster mitigation efforts are a socioeconomic necessity, therefore
Climate related disasters, whether in terms of hurricane destruction or the effects of draught and
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famine, pose difficult challenges, on the other hand. Apart from causing damage and destruction, they have serious consequences in terms of our need for land, water and energy to cater to the needs of an ever increasing population.
Two climate change related issues particularly raise our national security concerns:
–Global warming has increased overall aridity, worldwide, in the farmland region (0-30N) where most of the /world’s population lives. Global warming may thus hurt the world’s poorest nations the most. This raises the prospects of declining food production and may trigger water wars.
–Continued global warming is also likely to bring an “Ice Age” to Europe, by melting the polar ice caps and possibly destroying the thermohaline circulation.The Current Concerns in environmental geology therefore com-prise the following problems that threaten our collective survival:
- Geological problems that range from predicting the earth hazards to solving the problems of resource scarcity, and foundation engineering;
- Geoenvironmental problems that range from global warming and air water and pollu-
tion to soil-degradation, coastal habitat, and may be either long-term or abrupt; and - Geoeconomic and geopolitical problems attendant to the scarcity and/or depletion of
energy, minerals, water and soil resources on one hand and waste disposal related issues on the other.
What do thesestudies include?
/- Earth and earth materials:Earth, its shape, internal structure and age, minerals and rocks; Earth Processes of internal origin: Plate Tectonics; Earthquakes and Volcanoes.
- Processes on the Earth’s Surface:Streams and Flooding, Coastal Zones and Processes, Mass Movements and Geology and Climate
- .Resource and Environmental Problems:Water, Soil, Minerals and Energy Resources, Waste Disposal, Water and Air Pollution, Global Warming/Climate Change.