Re: paleonet AGI Report

[Bill Chaisson/Deirdre Cunningham <chaisson@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>The big boom of the Earth Sciences is over. It came in the sixties 
>with plate tectonics, profoundly changing our view of the world and 
>of its history. It was triggered by new techniques in satellite 
>positioning of ships and new seismic techniques much enhancing the 
>resolution power, which in turn were a result from forced technical 
>advance during world war II.

It is my understanding (I can not give a reference, but it has always 
made sense to me) that the earth sciences benefited greatly from the 
Cold War.  Technologies utilized extensively during the Second World 
War (e.g., explosion seismology) were instrumental (pun intended) in 
advancing the theory of plate tectonics in the 1950s.  The 
development of the third (most impregnable) arm of the nuclear triad, 
the submarine fleet, was furthered by throwing lots and lots of money 
at oceanography.  The stories of Maurice Ewing flying down to 
Washington and coming back with a satchel full of money are now 
legend.  Basic research advances in earthquake geology and 
paleoceanography were essentially tangential to Cold War needs.  (A 
footnote to all this is the advances in geophysics that made 
biostratigraphy distinctly less crucial to the oil industry.  The oil 
industry itself was inextricably bound up in the calculus of the Cold 
War.)

When the Soviet Union fell, the urgency to fund earth science 
declined.  Funding levels in the US have remained reasonable, but the 
number of new scientists entering earth sciences rose steadily 
through the 90s.  I believe that this is largely because of the 
composition of the field of earth sciences (I have not met very many 
politically attuned people along the way) and because of the dynamic 
of the academic setting (an active researcher needs graduate students 
to get work down).

I was a micropaleontologist interested in paleoecological and 
evolutionary topics and was told flat out by several colleagues that 
there was no future in it.  I should instead make alliance with 
stable isotope geochemists and focus on 'hot topics' in the field of 
paleoceanography.  As luck would have it, I am temperamentally 
unsuited to become enthusiastic in a sustained way about subjects 
that do not actually fascinate me.  I have therefore (at least 
temporarily) withdrawn from the rat race of the funding cycle and I 
am presently trying to figure out how to be an academic on my own 
terms.

Is it possible that the now-escalating 'War on Terrorism' will become 
the 'new Cold War' in the sense that the hysteria engendered by the 
pervasive fear of terrorism will produce the same result as the 
pervasive fear of nuclear attack?  That is, lots of money will be 
thrown at the scientific establishment and there will be so much 
available that, as happened during the Cold War, basic research of 
only tangential relation to strategic imperatives will also be 
funded.  Many of the same people (men, let's face it) who shaped the 
policy course through the final years of the Cold War are still at 
the helm in the current administration.  I doubt that this is their 
conscious intention, but it may in fact be the only way they know how 
to go about things.

Bill Chaisson