Science in the City

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations

Date posted: 12/24/15

Nina Morgan suggests that fieldwork can be made to come alive in the unlikely but convenient surroundings of city, suburban cemeteries, and home remodeling facilities selling cut and polished slabs for floors, kitchens, and bathrooms. Fieldwork is expensive, difficult to arrange, requiring extra effort and dedication on the part of teaching staff, and given the availability of computers and satellite imagery to illustrate geology virtually anywhere in the world, ultimately, some would argue, unnecessary. These are just a few of the arguments used to justify reducing, or even eliminating, the requirement for geology students to experience life in the field. Many practicing geologists, especially those aged over 40, will readily admit that the opportunity to study and do fieldwork in the great outdoors was one of the factors that drew them to study geology in the first place. But, as Jonathan Paul argued in his Soapbox article Adapt or Die (Geoscientist April 2014) fieldwork opportunities no longer serve as a draw for geology students today. Although, admittedly not a substitute for fieldwork in exotic locations like the Himalayas, the California deserts or even the Scottish Highlands, the growing field of urban geology, the geology of the built environment, provides one solution for overcoming the expense and difficulties of introducing to students to the principles of geology fieldwork. Championed by geologists at University College London (UCL) including, initially, Eric Robinson and now Ruth Siddall and her colleagues, urban geology is based on the idea that the town centers, burial grounds, and remodeling centers can serve as extensive outdoor museums, free to access, open to all, and ripe for introducing geology to the world at large ... but not for sampling. Although she admits that there is no substitute for exploring rocks in situ and in thin-sections for microscopic study. Good read ...