A UNIFIED FLUID THEORY OF GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION?

Geology dominates the geosciences because of the sheer number of geologists and geology departments in the United States. This is true of geoscience education as well, where the Journal of Geoscience Education’s articles remain largely focused on geology a quarter-century after the journal changed its name from the Journal of Geological Education.

It is fair to ask, what is geoscience education missing out on because its dominant practitioners are geologists? For example, what perspectives could atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, or hydrologists bring to the subject that might be muted or missing from the geological perspective?

In this presentation, I claim that the missing perspective is fluidity.

For most geologists, their subject matter is a solid, with fluid-like situations being relatively special cases, often under extremes of heat, pressure, and/or time. “Geo” = a solid.

For fluid earth scientists, however, the normal state of their subject matter is the fluid state; the solid state is instead the more special case (e.g., snow vs. rain and the air itself; ice caps vs. oceans; or rivers vs. ice jams). “Geo” includes fluids. In fact, nearly everything that is “geo” is a fluid in one circumstance or another. This is the gestalt shift that can result from the inclusion of fluid earth scientists in the discussion.

This dichotomy in perspective surfaces in multidisciplinary texts in the geosciences, e.g. introductory physical geography textbooks that are often authored by geologists. There is no particular rhyme or reason to the organization of the topics in these texts, because there is no organizing theme to the subjects in the book (meteorology, climatology, geology, other geosciences). Each topic is literally a solid chunk of material to be covered in sequence, with considerable repetition.

What if there were a different organizing principle for thinking about the geosciences, however? Such as, a perspective that cuts across disciplines and emphasizes the commonalities of the disciplines rather than their differences?

In this presentation, I provide several examples from my own teaching of focusing on unifying processes common to all the spheres of the geosystem, rather than by teaching each sphere sequentially. These processes are largely fluid processes.

Could an “everything on Earth is a fluid some/most/all of the time” principle be a grand unifying theme for teaching the geosciences as a coherent flowing whole, instead of as discrete chunks? This is the ultimate question of my presentation.