Re: paleonet AGI Report

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Bill,

I agree totally with you this time...War the old tool to re-burst economies 
also affects palaeontology indirectely!



Xavier Panades I Blas, Ms

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From: Bill Chaisson/Deirdre Cunningham <chaisson@netacc.net>
Reply-To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
Subject: Re: paleonet AGI Report
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 10:07:55 -0500

>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

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