e. Seismologists can't predict when an earthquake will hit. But knowing where plates interact and form fault lines, they can warn of vulnerability. Climatologists know that recycling of ocean crust and sediments - including carbon sequestered from atmospheric carbon dioxide - influences the composition of the atmosphere. Ecologists can better understand habitats in the Canadian Rockies when they know how these mountains crumpled up as two plates crunched together.
However, knowledge is only as beneficial as people make it. It did little good for seismologists to warn of Turkey's earthquake risk when building codes weren't enforced and people refused to leave high-risk areas. As Donald Swanson at the US Geological Survey's Hawaii Volcano Observatory has observed, "When you mesh natural hazards with politics, economics, development, etc., it's a recipe from which it's hard to make an edible dish."
Volcanologist Michael Sheridan with the State University of New York at Buffalo says the way to make it palatable is to combine public education with local monitoring. He says, for example, people "should know their volcano ... and identify safe areas." When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1992, such preparation was what Dr. Sheridan calls "the key to mitigation."
A decade of such cooperative planning also worked for Papua, New Guinea, when Mt. Rabaul erupted in 1994. Twelve people died, as opposed to 500 in the 1937 eruptions.
Such successes are relatively rare, though. Fouad Bendimerod at RMS Inc. in Menlo Park, Calif., and several colleagues writing in Science International warn that "the rate of urban risk caused by explosive population growth far exceeds the progress made in preparedness," especially in developing countries. The authors are part of an international scientific organization called the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative, which is trying to speed up the needed preparedness.
Citing United Nations statistics, Dr. Bendimerod and colleagues note that 80 percent of our planet's human population 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