Why_Env_Geol

Environmental Geology (Geol-102) is a 3-unit college transfer course that deals with the geological aspects of human interaction with earth and satisfies the physical science general education requirement for most baccalaureate programs in North America. Geology-112 (Laboratory Exercises in Environmental Geology) is the companion laboratory course for this class.

Environmental Geology is the study of human interactions with the earth environment, hazards and resources and is driven, primarily, by the demands of population growth.

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Updated on 05/05/2015

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Note that our continuing population growth implies concomitant growth in the demands on our natural resources and habitat, so stressing the environment. Thomas Malthus had thus argued in a June 1798 essay that the power of population greatly exceeds the power of the nature to sustain it.

Indeed, the world population, a little under a billion then, now exceeds 6 billion, attesting to the exponential-growth scenario that Malthus was the first to picture.

Ordinarily, this should have raised poverty, pestilence and strife. But the world economy, about 1 trillion 2000$ then, is now about 40 trillion $, when adjusted for inflation and purchase power parity across the world.

The paradox of technology:

Technology, not available when Malthus made his prediction, has clearly helped! But environmental stress attendant to the population growth has now created a catch-22 paradox:

In a closed 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.

For instance, Since the 1970s, natural disasters have accounted for two-thirds of the disaster-related fatalities worldwide although, contrary to the common perception, they have mostly come from sources other than earthquakes and volcanism (see the pie chart alongside) ― the hazards that are directly driven by the earth's internal energy system.

We could reasonably argue that technology has helped us limit the damages from geological hazards like earthquakes and volcanism. Thus, instead of reflecting the population’s exponential growth, earthquake fatalities overall 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.

A particularly noticeable aspect of this relationship between the state of a nation's or region's economy and the effect of a natural disaster is seen in the two illustrations below. As can be seen in the panel on the left below, disaster fatalities tend to be large in the countries with substantially large proportion of population living below the poverty line. In the case of a rich country like the U.S., on the other hand, the ten-fold decrease in number of fatalities has been accompanied with a ten-fold increase in the cost of destruction caused by the disasters!

Climate related disasters, whether in terms of hurricane destruction or the effects of draught and famine, pose difficult challenges. 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°-30°N) 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 comprise 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 pollution 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 these studies 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 etc.

Resource and Environmental Problems: Water, Soil, Minerals and Energy Resources, Waste Disposal, Water and Air Pollution, Global Warming/Climate Change.

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