GEO 2000 Full Report (NSF 00-27)
Contents
Foreword
- The
Context for a Decade of Discovery
- A
Vision for the Decade Ahead
- Goal
- Objectives
- IdeasThe
Research Agenda
- The
Scientific Agenda
- Research
Agenda Goals
- Knowledge
Base
- Planetary
Structure
- Planetary
Energetics and Dynamics
- Planetary
Ecology
- Planetary
Metabolism
- Service
to Society
- Prediction
of Hazardous Events
- Assessment
of Environmental Quality
- Prediction
of Longer-Term Change and Variability
- PeopleThe
Education Agenda
- ToolsThe
Implementation Agenda
- GEO
Investments
- Collaborations:
An Essential Strategy
- Conclusion
Acknowledgements
About the National Science Foundation
FOREWARD
The geoscience community
is eagerly entering the 21st Century and looking forward to the many challenging
research and educational opportunities that confront it during the next
decade. In recent years, the geosciences have enjoyed major advances in
understanding the Earth systems and the complex interactions among the
various elements: atmosphere, ocean, land surface and biosphere. These
dramatic advances are now providing new and enhanced opportunities for
geosciences, in combination with sister disciplines, to provide important
services to the nation through prediction of potentially harmful or beneficial
events.
To provide a strategy
to advance and integrate scientific knowledge across the broad range of
geosciences and to provide essential services to the country, the Directorate
for Geosciences periodically engages in a long-range planning activity
to evaluate opportunities and requirements for research, education, and
infrastructure. The process involves frequent communications and active
involvement among the scientific research and education communities and
the Geosciences Directorate staff. The Advisory Committee for Geosciences
has taken a key role in the development of the long-range strategy. The
Committee is composed of leading researchers and educators from the geoscience
disciplines and from the academic, government, and private sectors. In
addition, a special Working Group was commissioned to assist in the development
of the strategy and this plan.
The document resulting
from this close collaboration, NSF Geosciences Beyond 2000, continues
the essential geosciences planning process, but it takes a longer-range
perspective in recognition of both the 50th Anniversary of NSF and the
start of a new millennium. This plan for its first decade is based on
several key assumptions. The funding available to the Geosciences Directorate
will likely increase over this period, but pressures will continue to
select and make awards to the most highly rated efforts. The Directorate
will continue to seek partnerships within NSF, with sister agencies, and
with the international community to maximize the impact of its funding.
In addition, the Directorate will increase efforts to expand educational
opportunities for all levels from kindergarten through graduate school
as well as to provide a scientific foundation for the workforce of the
21st Century.
We are pleased to
be able to share the vision espoused in this plan. We are certain that
the Assistant Director for Geosciences, Dr. Margaret Leinen, and the Advisory
Committee Chair, Dr. David Simpson, will strive to expand the role of
the geosciences and will support the community in its efforts to bring
the vision to fruition over the coming years.
Robert W. Corell
Assistant Director for Geosciences
Susan Avery
Chair, Advisory Committee for Geosciences
THE CONTEXT FOR A DECADE OF DISCOVERY
The
Earth is unique in our Solar System. Among the planets, Earth alone has
the capacity to sustain such a vast panoply of evolving life. The Earth
is also ever-changing. Its orbit around the Sun varies; its physical and
chemical structure, climate, weather, and capacity to support life change
on many time scales; ocean currents shift; sea level rises and falls;
continents drift; mountains build and erode; animal and plant species
evolve; and terrestrial and marine ecosystems change. Most of these variations
occur and will continue to occur as the result of persistent natural forces.
Because the natural
variability of Earth has profound effects on society both economically
and in terms of quality of life, geoscientists have sought to understand
the basic processes that account for these changes. This is the challenge
of the geosciences — the atmospheric, oceanic, and solid Earth sciences.
The geosciences have made enormous progress in the 20th Century by unlocking
some of the most challenging mysteries of the Earth system and in so doing,
have engendered and enhanced our appreciation of the uniqueness of planet
Earth.
Today
we are profoundly aware that society has the ability to alter and/or exploit
the planet's physical, chemical, biological, and geological environments
on all scales — local, regional, and even global. Human impacts on the
atmospheric composition, the global ocean, the climate system, the water
cycle, the landscape, the solid Earth, and the diversity of life itself
will almost certainly grow in the next century as the global population
increases and economies expand and technologies emerge. At the same time,
because of our increasingly complex social and technological infrastructure,
we are more vulnerable than ever to natural hazards, biological variations,
and anthropogenic influences. Viewed more positively, because of our more
comprehensive understanding of the planet's environment, we are offered
new and unforeseen opportunities to improve the standards and quality
of life.
A more complete
knowledge of Earth as a complex system of interacting physical, chemical,
biological and geological processes will enable geoscientists to understand
how humans interact with and influence the Earth's environment. This understanding,
effectively shared with decision-makers, can be applied to improve detection,
prediction, mitigation, and, perhaps, even exploitation of natural and
anthropogenic environmental changes. As the "information age" progresses,
a vision emerges of an informed society that is empowered to maintain
a healthy planet and develop strategies to respond to the continuing challenges
posed by the Earth's physical and biological environments. In the future,
detailed knowledge of the full range of interacting Earth processes will
be essential for sustaining the health and prosperity of nations and individuals.
Equally important will be the need for educational innovations to enable
the populace to understand the complex and interwoven processes that support
and affect their lives. The agenda for geosciences aims to develop the
understanding society needs to maintain a healthy and habitable planet.
Recognizing
their significant discoveries and having developed powerful computational
and observing technologies, geoscientists, like other scientists before
them, are now poised to consider the challenge of prediction. In the geosciences,
prediction must be based on careful observation, comprehensive modeling,
and thorough understanding of the underlying processes. As a result of
the diversity among the geosciences, advances in predictive capability
will naturally vary from discipline to discipline: short-term weather
prediction is currently rather quantitative; longer-term climate predictability
is principally statistical; predictive capability for future earthquakes
continues to be characterized using probabilistic hazard assessment. In
the time horizon of this plan, we expect that geoscientists will be able
to predict the onset of particular, individual, or localized events, but
only under certain conditions. However, geophysical predictive capability,
used judiciously with other information, will contribute to the mitigation
of the tremendous losses currently suffered by society each year as a
result of natural phenomena such as floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and
hurricanes, for example. Thus, obtaining quantitative predictive capability,
and understanding the limits of predictability, will be a major impetus
and a continuing goal for many of the geosciences.
Recent developments
enable the geosciences to more effectively play a pivotal role in providing
the knowledge and tools to enable humankind to mitigate the tremendous
economic losses and societal disruptions caused by predictable geophysical
phenomena, and to take advantage of arising opportunities and benefits.
One development is the increased knowledge of the Earth system and its
inhabitants, based upon unprecedented advances in understanding environmental
and planetary processes. We can now aspire to explain many of the world's
physical, chemical, biological and geological processes with a level of
precision and certainty that provides improved predictive capacity and
supplies practical decision-making information to society. Another is
the revolutionary improvement in observing systems, computational capability,
and information processing. As a result, we have a growing ability to
observe and monitor Earth systems on nearly all space and time scales.
With our ever-increasing power to store, retrieve, and analyze vast quantities
of information, the ability to generate new knowledge is unprecedented.
Both the pace of scientific research and the direct application of research
results to the needs of society are accelerating. Together, these developments
enable the geoscience community to advance the science frontier and benefit
society.
An
outstanding example made possible by these developments is the recent
success in predicting the evolution of the 1997/98 El Niño and alerting
decision-makers of the potential impact on weather and climate around
the world. The short-term prediction still provided adequate time to prepare
for the mitigation of some of the worst effects of El Niño on agriculture,
property, and civil infrastructure, including the alleviation of flood
damage and disease outbreaks. It is important to emphasize that this predictive
ability was made possible by previous investments in basic research and
scientific infrastructure that greatly advanced the ability to observe
and model the interactions between the atmosphere and the oceans.
Our new monitoring
and predictive capabilities are based on the recognition that the Earth's
environment cannot be explained by studying any element in isolation.
The combined effects of many processes interact in complex ways to influence
the behavior of other components within the Earth system. Perhaps the
clearest example is the Earth's climate system. For example, climate and
the water cycle are driven not only by atmospheric phenomena but also
by the geologic setting, interactions between the marine and terrestrial
biospheres, the circulation and chemistry of the oceans, the radiative
properties of the Earth's surface, and planetary effects including the
radiant energy of the Sun and the orbital characteristics of Earth, as
well as anthropogenic influences. Similarly, other chains of interactive
geophysical and geochemical phenomena link global events ranging from
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions to changes in the productivity of the
oceans. In each case there is ample evidence that the components have
different quasi-stable states within their natural variability and that
transitions between the states can occur surprisingly fast.
In its modern context,
geoscience embraces not only studies of the Earth's components and their
interactions, but specifically includes studies of human influences and
considers the impacts on society. These studies draw upon a broad range
of scientific and technological expertise through both traditional disciplinary
and expanding interdisciplinary investigations. Growing understanding
of the linkages within the Earth system is enabling the development of
comprehensive models that are capable of predicting environmental and
planetary events more accurately than ever before.
Breakthroughs in
observing, modeling, and understanding complex Earth systems are coming
just at the time when society is in critical need of sound scientific
advice on how to mitigate or adapt to changes in the habitability of the
planet. The geosciences stand poised to make tremendous contributions
to improve the quality of life by providing useful information to decision
makers about the key planetary processes, their complex interactions,
and where possible, their future implications. The benefits of comprehensive
geophysical insight are everywhere apparent — the need for advanced research
in the geosciences has never been more urgent — the promise has never
been greater.
A VISION FOR THE DECADE AHEAD
Recognizing the vision
of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enable the Nation's future
through discovery, learning and innovation, the Directorate for Geosciences
(GEO), in cooperation with the geoscience community, has developed a focused
agenda to advance the science frontier through its continuing support
of challenging ideas, creative people, and effective tools.
Building on the
recent advances in geosciences, the goal of the NSF Directorate for Geosciences
for the first decade of the 21st Century is:
Goal
- To benefit
the nation by advancing the scientific understanding of the integrated
Earth systems through supporting high quality research, improving geoscience
education and strengthening scientific capacity.
Through its responsibility
for research, education, and service to the nation, the Directorate for
Geosciences is committed to achieving the following objectives:
Objectives
- Fostering discovery
and understanding of the factors that define and influence the Earth's environmental
and planetary processes.
- Expanding
understanding and predictability of the complex, interactive processes
that: (i) determine variability in the past, present and future states
of planet Earth; (ii) control the origin and current status of the forms
of life on the planet; and (iii) affect the interdependencies of society
and planetary processes.
- Providing
the resulting scientific information in forms useful to society.
The Directorate
accepts this challenge and will address the goal and these objectives
through merit-reviewed investments in the work of individual scientists,
small groups and centers, and large teams located primarily in the nation's
academic institutions and private research organizations. GEO will build
on its unique relationship with these individuals and institutions.
The Directorate's
strategic long-range plan is offered in the conviction that the time is
right to respond to the challenge of achieving these objectives by providing
support for a comprehensive national research and educational enterprise.
Through its support of the U.S. scientific community, GEO is prepared
to engage scientists, governments, industry, and citizens around the world
in the effort to increase our understanding of the nature of planet Earth
and its present condition. GEO-supported research and science will provide
information to decision-makers to secure a sustainable future for our
planet and for humankind.
The next chapters
will describe, in turn, the scientific and educational agendas and the
implementing activities that we anticipate will be undertaken by the Directorate
to achieve these goals.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This
summary version and the associated full plan, Geosciences Beyond 2000,
were prepared with the active participation of many individuals. The overall
project was conducted under the auspices of the Advisory Committee for
Geosciences, chaired by Dr. Susan Avery. A select Working Group was invited
to develop materials and review draft versions. Representatives of many
of the NSF divisions and programs provided valuable input. The plan was
vetted widely in the geoscience community through numerous discussions
and town meetings. The assistance of all parties is gratefully acknowledged.
Particular recognition should go to Dr. Robert Corell for his vision and
enthusiasm for the project, to Dr. Richard Greenfield who led the effort
during the critical drafting stages, and to Dr. Thomas Spence who saw
the project through to conclusion.
MEMBERS OF THE ADVISORY COMMITTEE FOR GEOSCIENCES DURING THE PROJECT |
Dr.
Susan Avery, Former Chair |
University
of Colorado |
|
Dr.
David Simpson, Chair |
Incorporated
Research Institiutions for Seismology |
|
Dr.
Eric Barron |
Pennsylvania
State University |
|
Dr.
Otis Brown |
University
of Miami |
|
Dr.
Inez Fung |
University of California, Berkeley |
|
Dr.
Robert Gagosian |
Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution |
|
Dr.
George Hornberger |
University
of Virginia |
|
Dr.
Emi Ito |
University
of Minnesota |
|
Dr.
James Knox |
University
of Wisconsin, Madison |
|
Dr.
Charles Kolb |
Aerodyne
Research, Inc. |
|
Dr.
Margaret Leinen |
University
of Rhode Island (now at NSF) |
|
Dr.
Marcia McNutt |
Monterey
Bay Acquarium Research Institution |
|
Dr.
Alexandra Navrotsky |
University of California, Davis |
|
Dr.
John Orcutt |
Scripps
Institution of Oceanography |
|
Dr.
Joseph Pandolfo |
|
|
Dr.
Judith Parrish |
University
of Arizona |
|
Dr.
David Schimel |
National
Center for Atmospheric Research |
|
Dr.
Sharon Smith |
University
of Miami |
|
Dr.
Denise Stephenson-Hawk |
Spelman
College |
|
Dr.
Lynne Talley |
Scripps
Institution of Oceanography |
|
Dr.
Robert White |
National
Academy of Engineering |
MEMBERS OF THE WORKING GROUP |
Dr.
William Bishop |
Desert
Research Institute |
|
Dr.
Kelvin Droegemeier |
University
of Oklahoma |
|
Dr.
Peter Eisenberger |
Columbia
University |
|
Dr.
Jack Fellows |
University
Corporation for Atmospheric Research |
|
Dr. Rana Fine |
University of Miami |
|
Dr.
Vijay Gupta |
University
of Colorado |
|
Dr.
Bradley Hager |
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology |
|
Dr.
Frank Harris |
University
of Tennessee |
|
Dr.
Thomas Jordan |
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology |
|
Dr.
Timothy Killeen |
University
of Michigan |
|
Dr.
William Merrell |
Heinz
Center |
|
Dr.
Berrien Moore |
University
of New Hampshire |
|
Dr.
Nicklas Pisias |
Oregon
State University |
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