QUATERNARY GEOLOGY AND GEOMORPHOLOGY DIVISION DISTINGUISHED CAREER AWARD: LETTING FLOODS TELL THEIR STORIES

Philosophers (both the professionals and the dilettantes) sometimes tell us that the process of science involves the scientist making statements, essentially telling a story, about the natural world. This is then followed, of course, by checking out that story against what one can observe and measure. This seems to be the case in physics, where the observing and measuring are formalized into controlled experiments, and story telling by the scientist gets expressed through elegant mathematical models. But is this the case in geology? To the degree that it is not, some would say that this merely represents the immaturity of geology as a science. Alternatively, there may be something fundamentally different in the point of view intrinsic to geology. Instead of ‘us’ (the scientists) telling the story, perhaps it is the natural world itself that tells the story, and ‘our’ role is that of listener, reader or translator.

For more than 30 years it has been my privilege to read and learn from flood stories, as told by the floods themselves. Of course, I have used a lot of tools, ranging from soil augers to computer models, in order to read and translate those stories. Among other things, these stories have told me that high-energy flooding can be a critical factor in landscape evolution; that immense megafloods were commonly associated with the great ice sheets that formed during Earth’s glaciations; that even greater, but much older, megafloods occurred on the planet Mars; and that humankind is suffering great damage to life and property by failing to read the natural signs that floods have presented. In some cases scientific understanding of magnitude and frequency for potentially hazardous flooding is being misled by theoretical constructs that do not even consider (let alone accord with) the stories conveyed by extreme floods. Moreover, by not relaying to the public the floods’ own stories, and instead asserting only the products of those constructs, science is failing to communicate the kind of understanding necessary to generate the political will to escape from the vicious circle of flood damage leading to flood protection leading to more development leading to more flood damage.