From Geo to Geo
First blog post in a series
By Katie Murenbeeld
February 14, 2024
I completed my undergraduate degree in geology at the University of Georgia, spending countless hours in the shadow of Sanford Stadium in an easily overlooked building. The Geography - Geology building, a thing of mid-century drabness wonder, contained a fallout shelter, equipment to shoot lasers at rocks in the basement, and a greenspace on the roof. A large majority of my then professors are now emeritus, so it’s been a while since I was there and my memory is a bit fuzzy on the layout of the building. The fallout shelter may be a figment of my imagination. However, I do distinctly remember NEVER going to the geography side of the building. To the geology students the geographers were our rivals, our mortal enemies, the “soft” GIS specialists to our “hard-rock” field mappers. And yet, here I am, many years later realizing that I am, in fact, a geographer. I am not sure when the change happened. In the time since graduating from UGA there was a gradual shift in my research from geology to geoscience, a shallowing of space, a shortening of time scales, and finally the consideration of human impacts on the land surface. These changes all combined to solidify my new (or newly acknowledged) role as a geographer.
“Rocks are not nouns, but verbs” - Marcia Blornerud, Timefulness
I’ve been slightly uncomfortable with this shift in research, mostly due to the geologic training I received during my undergrad (and silly rivalries), but geologists study the landscape, much as a geographer would. Davis, in his annual presidential address to the Geological Society of America in 1911, had this to say about the relationship of geology to physical geography. “…for all geography belongs under geology, since geography is neither more nor less than the geology of today, and [since] all geology is essentially the sum of a long succession of past geographies.” Both fields are very descriptive, yet implicit in each geologic description is a long history of various processes. Seemingly static, rocks and landscapes can teach much about the dynamics of the world, from the human timescales to “deep time”.
Physical and human geography investigate the present at human time scales, and shifting my focus to the human time scales of geography has been difficult. “Hard rock” geologists, like I was/am, mostly work with…rocks, which can be young (i.e. mid-ocean ridge basalts, 0yo) or very old (i.e. gneiss in Canada 4+Gya). Sedimentary rock ages are somewhere in the middle but have shorter lifespans (unless of course they are metamorphosed into crystalline rocks). Evidence of our own (human) existence may not even be found in the geologic record, or if it is, the evidence may only present itself as a thin plastiglomerate within a larger sandstone (Schimdt and Frank, 2018; Corcoran et al., 2014). Even then, said potential evidence could eventually be eroded away, subsumed through subduction, or become a unique foliation in some metamorphic rock. The point of all of this is that constantly contemplating “deep time” and our long term impact on the planet can lead to some feelings of ennui, nihilism, or recurrent existential crises.
After learning how to cope with human timescales, I now have to (re)learn how to ask geographic questions. Geologists and geographers ask very different questions. Geologists tend to ignore the human (really they ignore anything that can bleed). But I’ve been interested in more geographic questions for a long time. During my master’s I remember asking my advisor, Dr. Spence Titley, if I could study the impact of the commodity boom-and-bust cycle on mining towns. He replied with a surprisingly enthusiastic “Yes!”, and that I could study whatever I liked. I did not follow that route. I studied skarn deposits instead, and my main research question was simply, “Where is the gold?” His encouragement to explore the social aspects of economic geology always struck me, and now I realize that economic geology was my stepping stone into geography. Spence had an incredible life and passed away in 2019 Remembering Dr. Spencer Titley. From his stories of interactions with old prospectors in Colorado, to his assistance with lunar mapping during the Apollo space missions, and his study on the origin of copper in US pennies (Mathur et al., 2009), Spence made geology more human and understood the ways in which geologic understanding could impact society.
So, what can a geologist learn from a human geographer and vice versa? There are plenty of examples of anthropo-litho interactions, mining and geologic hazards are the first to come to mind.
What about the idea of humans as geologic agents? Some researchers and scientists argue over the existence and potential starting point for the Anthropocene when our impact globally may be seen in the future “deepe time” (refs). Will records of advanced civilizations be found in the Earth’s geologic record hundreds of millions of years from now? Or will only industrialized (i.e. using fossil fuels as energy) civilizations have a record (Schmidt and Frank, 2018)? Are industrialized civilizations the same as advanced civilizations? How would a geographer approach these questions compared to a geologist? If these questions interest you, then stay tuned. I will address these questions in a series of future blog posts.