Let earth speak!

In his history of earth science, entitled The Dark Side of the Earth, British geophysicist and science writer Robert Muir Wood argues that geology reached its intellectual peak around 1900. During the twentieth century according to Wood, geology’s intellectual decline coincided with the rise of modern physics, chemistry, and biology. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, a new earth science developed, replacing anachronistic “geological” concerns and methods with the global view and scientific methodologies of geophysics. Geochemist and science minister of France, Claude Allègre offers somewhat similar views on how much modern geochemical science has supplanted the “mapping mentality” of geology. According to these scholars, rigorous, scientific geophysical, geochemical, and (presumably) geobiological approaches are now replacing the outmoded geological one.