Geophysicist Quotes

I don’t imagine even many geophysicists, when asked to count their blessings, would include living on a planet with a molten interior, but it’s a pretty near certainty that without all that magma swirling around beneath us we wouldn’t be here now.

Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit every year, with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.

The path now is steep as hell—the new curve we’re on demands downright disruptive emissions cuts” of as much as 50 percent a decade. As the geophysicist Michael Mann put it, “what would have been a bunny slope was now a double black diamond.” That means, Steffen explained, that “climate action can no longer be orderly, gradual, or even continuous with our expectations

If, as a society, we ate meat less, the world would indeed be a brighter and more beautiful place. Consider, for example, the impact on global warming. Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, Assistant Professor of Geophysics at the University of Chicago, have calculated the benefits that would occur if Americans were to reduce beef consumption by 20 percent. Such a change would decrease our greenhouse gas emissions as substantially as if we exchanged all our cars and trucks for Priuses.

Whether you are an astronomer or a life scientist, geophysicist, or a pilot, you've got to be there because you believe you are good in your field, and you can contribute, not because you are going to get a lot of fame or whatever when you get back.

Are there any good reasons to expect that simple games can capture the essence of freezing, let alone of earthquakes, forest fires, and mass extinctions? It is fair to point out that Bak and Tang’s initial paper describing their earthquake game touched off a storm of criticism. Many geophysicists have spent their careers studying specific earthquake zones and fault systems in painstaking detail in an effort to understand earthquakes. To them, this slapdash mathematical approach seemed almost insulting, and served only to confirm about theoretical physicists what the biologist Francis Crick once said about mathematicians. “In my experience,” he concluded, “most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers.”10 After all, here were a handful of theorists who never took a first university course in Earth science, and who were nonetheless claiming that they could explain earthquakes with a toy model that includes almost nothing of the complex detail of the physical setting in which real earthquakes occur.

Japan is known for its earthquakes. A quake releasing ten times as much energy leveled the city of Nobi in central Japan in 1891, and others struck in 1927, 1943, and 1948 at other locations. The intervals between these great earthquakes—thirty-five, sixteen, and five years—hardly form a simple, predictable sequence, as is typical of earthquakes everywhere. If the historian H. A. L. Fisher failed to see in history “a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern,” then so too have geophysicists failed utterly, despite immense effort, to discern any simple pattern in the Earth’s seismic activity. Modern scientists can chart the motions of distant comets or asteroids with stunning precision, yet something about the workings of the Earth makes predicting earthquakes extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible.

With reluctance, geophysicists are now beginning to accept that every earthquake, large or small, arrives at the far end of a long and immensely complex historical development within the Earth’s crust. As a result, the dynamics of earthquakes can be understood only with the perspectives of historical physics, and especially through the concept of the critical state. The message: Massive quakes may arise out of the very same conditions as small, and quakes of all kinds may be totally unpredictable. As with avalanches in the sandpile game, the largest and most devastating earthquakes may take place when and where they do for no special reason at all.

Trouble is, the real world isn’t like this. If geophysicists don’t know much about the laws of friction between sliding rock surfaces, they do know for sure that there is friction—and this friction ought to eat up some of that force. So the Bak-Tang rule is most certainly not legitimate. Trying to respond to this objection, Bak and Tang altered the rule to make things more realistic. But when they did, the game changed into something else. It wasn’t equivalent any longer to the sandpile game, and its power law evaporated. Earthquakes were not explained.

Theoretical and experimental physicists, working on problems of esoteric intellectual interest, provided the knowledge that eventually was pulled together to make the H-bomb, while mathematicians, geophysicists, and metallurgists, wittingly or unwittingly, made the discoveries necessary to construct intercontinental ballistic missiles. Physicists doing basic work in optics and infrared spectroscopy may have been shocked to find that their research would help government and corporate engineers build detection and surveillance devices for use in Indochina. The basic research of molecular biologists, biochemists, cellular biologists, neuropsychologists, and physicians was necessary for CBW (chemical-biological warfare) agents, herbicides, and gaseous crowd-control devices… Anthropologists studying social systems of mountain tribes in Indochina were surprised when the CIA collected their information for use in counterinsurgency operations. Psychologists explored the parameters of human intelligence-testing instruments which, once developed, passed out of their hands and now help the draft boards conscript men for Vietnam and the U.S. Army allocate manpower more effectively. Further, these same intelligence-testing instruments are now an integral part of the public school tracking systems that, beginning at an early age, reduce opportunities of working-class children for higher education and social mobility

For a geophysicist, what’s going on is stunning,” my friend told me. “We used to believe these systems needed thousands of years to make these shifts. Instead it’s happening so fast that it’s terrifying. Conceivably, you could start seeing truly bad effects in a hundred years.

Geophysicists have claimed the excess energy may be continuously injected into Earth’s outer core, feeding the mysterious magnetic dynamo that creates Earth’s magnetic force field. If you’re lucky you can even see it, on clear nights at extreme latitudes. Earth’s magnetic shield produces the spectral electric-green ribbons of the aurora borealis and aurora australis. Birds can see it, too. Any compass can feel it. The magnetic field surrounds the planet and flows around it in the solar wind, like a curtain flapping in a breeze.