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Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Volume 53, 2025

Geology: The Once and Future Crown Jewel of Science?

  • Walter Álvarez1,2
  • 1Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA; email: [email protected] 2Osservatorio Geologico di Coldigioco, Contrada Coldigioco, Apiro, Macerata, Italy
  • Vol. 53:1-31 (Volume publication date May 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on November 12, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

As a field geologist, I have been involved in the overwhelming excitement of three scientific revolutions—a mini revolution in structural geology, the impact-extinction revolution that freed geology from uncompromising uniformitarianism, and the plate tectonic revolution that turned the routine field of geology into one of the most exciting and essential sciences of the present time. I have also worked across several discipline boundaries, an activity I call scientific trespassing. My career has unfolded in such unexpected ways that, like anyone's life and like the history of our planet, it can only be seen as a most improbable journey. A focus on these three concepts and on the history of geology (a traditional name used here for all the Earth sciences) leads to the understanding that geology was once the crown jewel of sciences, and that after a century of necessary but routine geologic mapping, geology now needs to resume its crown jewel role because the understanding and care of our planet is becoming humanity's most urgent task.

Keyword(s): autobiography, comparing geology and archaeology, discipline boundaries, geology as the essential science, improbability, scientific revolutions
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2025-05-30
2025-06-13
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Geology: The Once and Future Crown Jewel of Science?
Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 53, 1 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-earth-041023-094929
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-earth-041023-094929
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-earth-041023-094929
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