Memorandum submitted by the British Geophysical
Association (FC 33)
1. The British Geophysical Association (BGA)
is a joint association of the Royal Astronomical Society and the
Geological Society of London and represents members of either
Society whose specialisation is geophysics, ie the application
of physics to the study of the Earth and its planetary environment.
UK geophysicists are employed in university research and teaching,
petroleum exploration and exploitation, civil engineering, environmental
consultancy, and government service. The UK is a world leader
in both pure and applied geophysical research, and many UK geophysicists
take part in, or lead, international research consortia.
2. Geophysics is a broad area of study and
includes topics vital to the well-being of society, for instance
the diverse causes of sea level change; earthquake and volcano
monitoring and prediction; the geomagnetic field and near-Earth
space environment used by satellites; detecting and extracting
subsurface oil and gas accumulations; and predicting and monitoring
subsurface engineering for oil and mineral extraction, waste disposal
and carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage.
3. Data for geophysical research are often
expensive to obtain, eg seismic exploration data collected by
dedicated ships using specialist equipment refined by many years
of research. Their value is seldom restricted to the immediate
purpose for which they were obtained, for instance, marine seismic
data obtained for oil exploration are now being used to map ocean
currents, and decades-long records of the Earth's magnetic field
are used in the prediction of geomagnetic disturbances and "space
weather" that affect satellites. Some of these uses could
not have been predicted when the original data were obtained.
The BGA's concern is that funding cuts might cause:
4. (a) Cessation or interruption of
UK involvement in international projects to collect and maintain
long timespans of geophysical data, eg the Ocean Drilling Program's
unique collection of seafloor rock and sediment cores, which contain
a record of past climate change, but must be stored in a controlled
environment to avoid degradation. UK scientists would then be
denied access to the resources and would have no input into the
future of these programmes.
5. (b) Lack of support for archiving
and curating geophysical data, including borehole cores, continuous
seismometer records, meteorological and geomagnetic readings,
and oceanographic data, causing the resources put into their collection
and curation so far to be wasted;
6. (c) Loss of UK expertise in instrument
design, geophysical data collection, processing, interpretation
and preservation. UK students and professionals in these areas
will seek to pursue them abroad, or lose their expertise, and
aspiring geophysicists be deterred from entering the profession.
This would be particularly deleterious to the UK economy, which
is already experiencing a shortage of geophysicists in the oil
industry and can anticipate needs for geophysical skills in nuclear
waste disposal, carbon capture and storage, and geothermal energy
exploitation. Geophysics is a "hard science" requiring
an early choice of specialisation in maths and physics by secondary-school
pupils. Deterring pupils now is likely to cause a worsening skill
shortage in 5-10 years' time.
7. The geophysical data described above
have to be collected continuously and routinely, and often respond
to slowly-varying phenomena with periods longer than the five-year
parliamentary cycle, for instance the 11-year sunspot cycle, and
(ill-defined) cycles of up to thousands of years between mega-earthquakes
at plate boundaries such as the Sumatra-Andaman arc, the Caribbean,
and Japan. Planetary data, for instance from Mars, which are valuable
in predicting environmental change on Earth, have additionally
both long spaceship design and flight times and, for outer planets,
longer orbital periods and hence longer data collection times
before useful seasonal cycles can be observed. The BGA criticised
on these grounds the Higher Education Funding Council for England
(HEFCE) proposed use of inevitably short-term "impact"
to measure eligibility for funding in the proposed Research Excellence
Framework (REF), by which the "research" element of
HEFCE funding will be decided.
8. We are also concerned that "impact"
and "significance" of geophysical research might be
assessed by (a) non-specialists, and (b) biased panels of specialists.
Non-specialists' judgements are both subjective and unverifiable,
and should not contribute to assessment of research excellence.
Specialists need to be drawn from an international pool, because
of the global nature of geophysics. Bias will arise because the
oil and resource extraction industries are highly motivated to
send their specialist employees to be panel members, while geoscience
research has impacts on the poorest people in the most environmentally
vulnerable areas of the Earth, whose interests risk not being
represented, or even assessed.
9. The BGA also submitted a response to
the Committee's consultation on the regulation of geo-engineering
to mitigate climate change. The gist of our response was that
geo-engineering project proposals should be assessed by means
of reality-based geophysical modelling of their likely effects.
To achieve this, geophysical data sets are needed as input to
the modelling, and skilled geophysical modellers are required.
Cuts to the UK geophysics base endanger both these, the data as
described above, but particularly the skills, which have to be
developed through a specialist research degree and years of experience
in a research environment. The probable disastrous effects of
runaway climate change and the desperate measures, such as deep
cuts in CO2 emission, being proposed to prevent it, will lead
to future geo-engineering project proposals. Without geophysical
research, these expensive projects might either lead to disaster
or be ruled out as too risky and their possible benefits lost.
10. The study of the Earth is an interdisciplinary
science, so geophysical research cannot be considered completely
in isolation from research in other areas. Cuts in those areas
might have unintended deleterious effects. For instance, geophysical
modelling often requires large computing power and storage, so
the recent threat by the Japanese government to their scientific
supercomputer project is thus indirectly a threat to geophysical
research. Interaction of the Earth with the biosphere has been
increasingly recognised as an important driver of Earth systems,
so for instance sampling, genetically analysing and cultivating
organisms from seafloor hot chemical springs, carried out as part
of the Ocean Drilling Program, might have a bearing on proposed
geothermal-energy systems. Fundamental physics, for instance the
interaction of neutrinos with the Earth's interior, could open
the way for novel geophysical imaging based on particle accelerator
science and engineering. Finally, the Haiti earthquake is a disaster
for reasons couched in global-scale economics, sociology and politics,
which led to so many poor people in ill-constructed dwellings
being vulnerable, as much as in the geophysics of plate tectonics
in the Caribbean. It is difficult to predict the effect on geophysics
of cuts in other branches of knowledge, but such prediction should
be attempted by appropriately qualified scientists when cuts are
proposed.
11. In summary, the consequences of cuts
driven by the short-term addressing of the economic crisis would
be profound and damaging in the long term to geophysical research,
which in turn underpins the political decisions required to maintain
Earth systems in a condition to support comfortable human existence.
UK geophysicists are so deeply involved in the global scientific
effort to understand and, possibly, control the environment and
resources that cuts made by the UK alone cannot be regarded as
insignificant to global geophysical science.
January 2010
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