2022 FAROUK EL-BAZ AWARD. AN EARTH SCIENTIST’S VIEW OF THE DESERT

The English word desert is believed to have originated from an Egyptian hieroglyph pronounced tesert, that meant forsaken. The Egyptian word evolved into the Latin verb deserere, which means to abandon. The human concept of, and relation to, “deserts” has thus changed enormously through the Holocene. Throughout much of this time, deserts were simply deserted (or, in the Bible, areas uninhabited by the Hebrews). Today, the scientific definition largely rests on regions lacking in water or thermal conditions necessary to support life.

The Earth is a planet constantly reinventing itself. Wind, water, glaciers, and earthquakes remodel the planet’s surface in intervals of thousands of years, the equivalent of geological cosmetic surgery on a middle-aged planet. In contrast, in absolute deserts like the Atacama, geoglyphs constructed by ancient Americans thousands of years ago create an outdoor art gallery that lacks only a visitor’s guide. The artists themselves occasionally are found in nearby burials, desiccated to perfection, requiring only water, it seems, to rise-up and walk again. The footprints and mule trails of the 19^th century nitrate miners lie naked on the desert floor, seemingly softened by only a slight drizzle sometime the past century. Only on the windless moon, would one imagine, can the mark of man persist for so long.

Thus, deserts are enormous stores of information about Earth history. They are also some of the most fragile regions on our planet. Deserts are windows to the limits of biological adaptation, test sites for innovations in geochemical tools and their application to understand earth surface processes, and are insights into the climatic history of Earth, and our near neighbor Mars.

But will the deserts that many of us have explored exist for those who are now entering the field? Off-road auto racing, surficial strip mining of salts, Cu mining, and the construction of solar facilities, are rapid and catastrophic changes to deserts whose scars will remain for millennia. What can scientific bodies and societies do to address this? Maybe the most profound question about deserts is not what remaining secrets we can scientifically extract from them, but whether humanity has evolved sufficiently to assure that they will remain intact for the future.