Science Spin September 2008

Geologists building rock-solid links

By Tom Kennedy

The real pillars of our economy are not to be found in finance or marketing, but in natural resources said Dr Patrice Christmann, director of Euro Geo Surveys. Without natural resources, he explained, we would have no economy at all. From the time when someone found that they could strike one stone against another and make a spark, humanity has been building on these resources. "Without these resources," he commented, "life would be a misery."

Dr Christmann, explained that the European body represents the profession all the way from Ireland to Vladivostok. Although 26 national survey organisations are in the Federation, he said, their influence is diluted because they are so fragmented. "There is great difficulty in delivering harmonised data at the European level," he said, and he gave ground water as a prime example. Nineteen major European ground water resources of high economic value, he said, are cross border. Energy is also a cross border issue of huge importance, and Dr Christmann made the point that not alone do we have to demonstrate the importance of geology, but geologists have to become much better at co-ordinating their own resources.

"Comparing data from different countries," he remarked, "can be a real nightmare," and he gave the Chunnel as an example of how this jacks up costs. "When the Chunnel was being built both sides had excellent data," he said, "but they were based on totally different models, so a lot of time had to be spent translating this data into a common form." It is not that one set of data is better than the other, he added, just different, and that makes it difficult to initiate and run cross-border projects.

Demand

By comparison, he noted, these problems do not exist with support and interpretation of satellite data, and there are a number of European projects, such as the marine observation data network, and disaster risk assessment, that involve geology. However, geology is not in the lead, and as Dr Christmann observed; "The demand for geology at a European level is growing quite rapidly, but even so, geological surveys do not have a clear remit to meet this demand."

In spite of the problems, diversity has been good for geology. National survey organisations have developed a range of different strengths, and as Dr Christmann pointed out, with unity of purpose, those skills would be available to all, and "there would be no need to reinvent the wheel."

Geology, observed Dr Christmann, has lots of end users, including architects, engineers, planners, to name just a few. Geologists, he said, are capable of seeing the big picture, yet they do not always realise that end users might not know what they are talking about. "The town mayor," he said, "does not want a map with eighty colours; no, he wants just three, green for no risk, organge for medium risk, and red for high risk."

About half a million geologists are at work around the world, and Europe alone can lay claim to 140,000 of these. Many of these, said Prof Manuel Regueiro y Gonzaiez-Barros, belong to the 40,000 strong European Federation of Geologists. After a long and distinguished career with the Spanish Geological Survey and elsewhere, Prof Regueiro was recently elected president of the Federation. "Geologists," he said, should stop being humble, they should assert themselves. Other professionals have a far higher profile, so, as he put it, "they are taking our business."

Future

The demand for geologists, he said, is on the rise, unemployment is almost unheard of, yet not enough people are going into the science. Geologists, he remarked face professional extinction. "When that happens," said Prof Regueiro, "others are ready to step in," and the unsuitability of these professionals it not just an issue of qualifications. Geologists, he said, see things differently. They don't just think of distance and scale, they consider time.

"No other scientists," said Prof Regueito "work in four dimensions," and the importance of this becomes painfully obvious in planning. A geologist, he noted, would never endorse a development scheme for housing in a flood plain, yet after ever disaster, people ask "why did no one tell us that this would happen?" The only answer they are likely to get from a geologist is that "we did, but you did not listen." The same has proved to be true for earthquake zones where developers, time after time, make the same mistakes.

Geologists, commented Prof Regueiro, are pushed out into the cold because they do not assert themselves. "Geologists have not been trained to be leaders," he said, and this is different in other professions. Architects, engineers, lawyers and doctors, he noted, are expected to take decisions and take charge.
Another way in which this has an impact, he said, is in the ongoing debate about the environment. "Everybody talks about the environment in a biological sort of way," he said. "You can see a flower, but how many understand the role of the sub-soil?"

Garth Earls, Director of the the NI Geolological Survey, remarked that far too many geologists stay in geology. "They need to get into management positions, as happens in other professions."Ben Kennedy, former head of Geology at UCD, said that it would be useful for students to acquire some employable skills, and pooling of resources between departments would also help. Ireland's geology departments, he noted, are small, but collectively they can offer a great range of expertise.

"People like me." observed hydrologist David Ball, "don't write papers, we talk to farmers." As a hand-on scientist, David, said he has no problem capturing the interest of people, and he believes there is a lesson here for geologists. Being hands-on does not make a geologist less of a scientist, yet, as he observed, "the people who are most likely to get people interested in the sciences are not those who are being honoured in public by the science community."

Value

Geology adds abut €3.3 billion a year to the Irish economy, said Peadar McArdle, director of the Irish Geological Survey. "If indirect benefits are added," he said, "we are looking at over €4 billion, and that's three per cent of our gross national product.

Mineral resources, he said, are just part of the overall picture, and geology is one of the essential supports for Ireland's growing "knowledge economy." The government's National Development Plan recognised this by backing projects such as the INFOMAR programme, a joint venture between GSI and the Marine Institute. In another move, described by Peadar as "an enabling action" the government made the decision to free up access to geological data.

Geology based activities are on the rise, and Peadar said that they have only to think of mining, energy, and construction materials to see its relevance. Over 12,000 people work in mining, he said. "These are well paid jobs and rurally based," he said, and on a more widespread scale this is true of construction materials. Exploration for gas and minerals is on the increase, yet the profile of the sector, said Peadar, is still too low.

Many people, he said, in spite of its importance to the economy, do not even realise that it is a sector, and the knock-on effect of this is that students do not consider geology. "Ireland produces about 60 geology graduates a year," said Peadar, "and this is not enough to meet future needs." Of 1,100 graduates produced over the past thirty years, he added, only 300 still practice in this part of the world, and fifty per cent of these are due to retire within the next decade.

One of Peadar's concerns is not so much decline in numbers, as loss of knowledge, just at a time when it is badly needed. Water resources, he observed, need to managed. "Ground water is so important in Ireland, yet we don't have post-graduate courses in this subject," he said. His point is that Ireland needs to make up for this weakness by investing in the future. The increased investment in research, he noted, is very welcome, but at the same time, geosciences still only attract five per cent of the national R&D funds.