New tools and specialisms in the Earth sciences have emerged to help manage humanity's predicament with the environment and its resources. Global positioning satellites and satellite altimetry open up new ranges of observation of the Earth in space and time. Powerful modes of computer modelling allow experimental strategies involving large data sets to be devised and quickly refined. The Internet puts communities of scientists in instant communication with one another. Synchrotron radiation sources with powers many orders of magnitude greater than when X-rays were discovered allow views of unprecedented precision into materials.
Nevertheless, the problems of climate change, flooding, pollution and energy shortage are all too familiar in many parts of the world, while strategies for dealing with them often remain obscure. Research challenges at the most fundamental level await the efforts of geoscientists. For example, Miriam Kastner of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, points out that we did not know of the existence of subsea vents until 1980. Since then we have discovered that the entire volume of the oceans cycles through them once every 5 million years, and through the subduction zones once every 200 million years.
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