is crowding into 3 percent of the land. Many people are jamming into megacities in areas vulnerable to floods, severe storms, and earthquakes. Focusing on quakes, they estimate that every dollar spent on preparedness saves, on average, $10 in disaster recovery costs.
To gain such a benefit, geoscientists have to work as part of a human community in which other players have different agendas and perspectives. Moreover, the scientists have to work with each other. Geologists, seismologists, volcanologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, biologists all need one another's insights to fully understand the natural processes of our planet. That is why they are taking down the intellectual walls that separated their special interests a hundred years ago. Those interests now are merging into the new overarching field of planetary system science. As Charles Kennel, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, puts it: "We are about to cross the threshold into an extraordinary age of scientific research - global change research. We are about to kick this [science] to a new level."
Wegener, despised by specialists a half century ago, would finally seem to have the last word. In the foreword of the final (1929) version of his book on drifting continents, he observed: "It is only by combining the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine 'truth.' "
(c) Copyright 1999. The Christian Science Publishing Society