EOS4.1

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) www.iugs60.org  is the global champion for what is variously referred to as Earth sciences, Solid Earth Science or Geological Sciences. It is part of the International Science Council (ISC) https://council.science/ and works with several related ISC Unions and UNESCO.  Our Earth is faced with mounting challenges related to the climate crisis, which are largely due to the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The geological sciences have in past decades paved the way in understanding how to locate these fuels for industry to extract and society to use. The geological sciences also underpin mineral extraction, provision of building materials, groundwater, quality of soils and many other issues all of which are essential for human life on Earth.

The transition is underway and geoscientists will lead on several issues, most of which will raise ethical issues: subsurface energy systems in terms of ground stability, seismicity, extent of the resource the safety of the process; mining and the need for critical metals to satisfy new energy technologies – this includes more mining locally and ethically, thus affecting global mining regions and ethically, but also mining in extreme conditions e.g., on the seafloor or the moon; intensive farming and food production and the impacts on water supply and soil quality; the continued need for gold to underpin cryptocurrency; the need for sustainable investment and the move away from oil and gas investments.

There are many more examples and all require a reasoned approach involving a delicate interplay of engineering, business, scientists including social and economic experts, and the public. The geological sciences will continue to be the part of the Earth systems science domains that drive economic growth.  International Unions and meetings such as EGU are fora in which these debates can happen, however all too often they fail to bring together all the stakeholder in the debate.

We as geoscientists need to create the space to engage with the wider communities in the next industrial revolution.

How to cite: Ludden, J.: Geoscience for the next decade: how can geoscientists engage with communities in creating the next industrial revolution?, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-2998, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-2998, 2022.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), a scientific society of >60,000 members worldwide, has established a set of scientific integrity and professional ethics guidelines for the actions of its members, the governance of the union in its internal activities, and the operations and participation in its publications and scientific meetings.  The actions around the AGU Ethics policy have in recent years focused on establishing and reinforcing professional conduct standards, including professional conduct during field research.  However, the recently updated AGU Strategic plan has a strong focus on applied transdisciplinary science; growing respect for Indigenous data, cultural heritages, and Knowledges; and emphasis on geoscientists’ responsibility to support traditionally underserved communities with respect to environmental justice, issues of equity and inclusion, and the impact of global anthropogenic change. Additional emerging ethics issues for the geosciences include a need to establish ethical AI frameworks for effective decision-making without misuse of data, and a need for ethical guidance around testing proposed climate intervention technologies.

These combined foci have heightened AGU’s attention to global Geoethics and have led to a re-examination of the partnerships necessary to deliver important education and impacts on such pressing issues. This presentation will highlight a few of the Geoethics issues currently being addressed by the AGU Ethics and Equity Center, including results to date and actions underway to secure and support the necessary broad partnerships. 

How to cite: Williams, B., Davidson, E., Fraiser, M., Pandya, R., and Hanson, B.: Geoethics Issues for the 21st Century: Perspectives from the AGU Ethics and Equity Center - A Call for Education and Action     , EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-6385, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-6385, 2022.

If the geosciences demand to be taken more seriously and to play a greater role in political and societal decision-making, they must take on great responsibility.

If we are to act ethically, we must define values against which decisions about ethical behavior can be made. These values are often summarized as shared geoethical values (see Peppoloni & di Capua, 2017).

These values can be found on  

• an Ethical dimension: for example, honesty, integrity, awareness, accuracy, collaboration, inclusiveness, civility, and fairness,
• a Social dimension: addressing the grand challenges (sustainability, prevention, education),
• a Cultural dimension: values such as geological diversity, diversity of geological-geographical landscapes or geological heritage.

Although these values are well founded and can be considered shared values, we need to be aware that they represent a strongly academic (Western) perspective and to some extent disregard other knowledge systems, such as indigenous or traditional ecological knowledge, as well as stressful socioeconomic contexts.

This creates fundamentally new challenges, for example, when the evaluation criteria of different sustainability goals are not compatible with local or regional socio-cultural values. Even different prioritizations can lead to difficulties here, which have an impact not only on research and development but even more so on recommendations for action resulting from the research. Examples of this can be found in the context of the current global Grand Challenges. The increasing demand for highly specialized raw materials, emerging conflicts over resources such as drinking water or soil, or the developments regarding coastal protection caused by climate change are some examples.

With this presentation we want to raise awareness of socio-cultural differences. In order to act geoethically, we need to consider the sociocultural context. Therefore, we want to initiate a discussion on whether and how a contextual model can be integrated into the concept of geoethics. This contextual model (in analogy with Neuliep's Contextual Model of Science Communication, 2021) seems to be able to solve the problems that arise when the geosciences claim the important role in global decision making mentioned above.

How to cite: Schneider, S.: Geoethics – an new approach to include awareness for sociocultural context, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-1697, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-1697, 2022.

In the early 2000s, the reproducibility crisis began to ‘shake’ the scientific community¹ and continues nowadays². The scientific method (SM) relies on the empirical confirmation of hypotheses³. Reproducibility of results is at the core of the SM, although it is possible, stricto sensu, only in some configurations⁴. Many phenomena studied in Earth Sciences cannot be empirically replicated. Thus, Earth Sciences face an intrinsic ‘reproducibility crisis’. How to confront this dilemma? In 2018, an Editorial in Science⁵ suggested that “…improving reproducibility will require…the best possible practices.” What are these best possible practices? Some clues can be found in Bunge’s work. He proposed that SM’s classical correspondence thesis of truth (CTT) can be replaced by the synthetic thesis of truth (STT)⁶. STT requires considering a hypothesis corroborated by empirical confirmation and consistency with the bulk of existing background knowledge (systemicity)⁷. STT relies on multiple empirical and theoretical approaches: a scientific test is adequate to the extent that it is neither purely empirical nor viewed in isolation. Pattern consistency (empirical control) and an understanding of causal relations (rational and empirical control) make confirmed hypotheses more reliable. The history of sciences shows this approach was followed on multiple occasions⁸, for example, to develop the theory of special and general relativity. The STT combines empirical evidence, stochasticity (combining deterministic and probabilistic approaches), heuristic approaches, mental experiments, computer modelling, among other rational instruments. When the Covid-19 crisis hit, several successful practices were based on this approach⁹. Considering epistemology, the knowledge-building process of the STT approach is an excellent practice to overcome the reproducibility crisis on Earth Sciences. The intersection of different knowledge domains is a two-way road and implies a knowledge overlap among different epistemic domains. Epistemology is the domain of philosophy of sciences that is fundamental for developing geoethics considering how the reproducibility crisis on Earth Sciences can be handled.  

1.       Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005a). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine, 2 (art. e124). 

2.       Saltelli, A., Funtowicz, S. (2017). What is science’s crisis really about? Futures, Volume 91, 2017, Pages 5-11, ISSN 0016-3287, 

3.       Staddon, John (2017). Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work or Pretends to Work. Taylor and Francis.

4.       Baker, Monya (2016). 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility. Nature. Springer Nature. 533 (7604): 452–454. 

5.       Berg, J. (2018) Progress on reproducibility. SCIENCE 5 Jan 2018 Vol 359, Issue 6371 p. 9 

6.       Bunge, M. (2012). The correspondence theory of truth. Semiotica, 188: 65-75. 

7.       Marone, L., Lopez de Casenave, J., & González del Solar, R. (2019). The synthetic thesis of truth helps mitigate the reproducibility crisis and is an inspiration for predictive ecology. Revista De Humanidades De Valparaíso, (14), 363–376. 

8.       Renn, J. (2020). The Evolution of Knowledge - Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press.

9.       Marone, E., and Bohle, M. (2020). Geoethics for Nudging Human Practices in Times of Pandemics. Sustainability 12, 7271. 

How to cite: Marone, E. and Bohle, M.: About reproducibility. The advantages of the synthetic thesis of truth., EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-9010, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-9010, 2022.

Science provides society with information that helps solve the ethical, societal and social implications of climate change, the most urgent and far-reaching global problem of our time. Owing to the complexity of the problems that arise, they are not solved with knowledge or one responsible goodwill alone, but often require value judgements, for example, decisions on the relative importance of different stakeholders. Interdisciplinary scholarship, first of all, philosophy of science, argues that some of these and other value judgements can already play a role in the scientific process that both produces such information and that develops more foundational scientific tools, methods, and results underlying it.

Here, it is argued that it is time for the scientific community itself to become more aware of, acknowledge, and discuss the role of values, to enable their effective management and thus make science observe its responsibility to society even better.The state of the debate in climate science as represented by the latest assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is summarised. Examples from the recent philosophical literature are given that illustrate value influence beyond that acknowledged in the report. Key messages are suggestedto the scientific community as to how the topic of values could be progressed, including strategies such as transparency and diversity, cross-disciplinary cooperation and education besides, and aiding, the fostering of awareness by individual scientists in their research.

As an attempt to advance and illustrate this awareness and acknowledgement of values from a scientist perspective, a case study is further presented. There, value judgements are identified that are relevant to multi-model based assessments such as those performed until recently for climate sensitivity and still in use for various other climate metrics. The whole series of assessment steps is considered, from choosing the research question over model building, deriving the metric of interest, and combining model results to publishing and communicating the findings. It is discussed that neither sensitivity studies nor the use of multiple, other lines of evidence instead of model estimates provide a way to avoid value judgements, hence not diminishing the need for reflection on values. While especially timely now in climate science, the question of value acknowledgement and management more generally applies to any science, including other areas of geosciences that are similarly addressing questions of high societal relevance.

How to cite: Undorf, S., Pulkkinen, K., Wikman Svahn, P., and Bender, F.: The role of values in climate science, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-12732, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-12732, 2022.

The geological record of earth history is a fragile document, which enables us to extract information on past planetary processes, e.g. natural hazard events or fluctuations of the earth's climate, which are increasingly used as the basis for future regulatory frameworks in modern societies. However, due to an intense interference of humans with the earth surface in the Anthropocene, this unique document of earth history is endangered. It is crucial to consider that the geological record is not continuous and primarily incomplete, although the exact extent is still elusive. Human activities such as mining and construction works heavily alter, disturb or even entirely destroy parts of the earth history. Also, inadequate sampling strategies of earth scientists can contribute to a loss of earth-historical information at key sites for understanding the earth's past. Most societies are well aware of the conservation of the human history indicated by standardized archaeological surveys. At the same time, such procedures are hardly formalized for earth history archives, revealing an anthropocentric narrowing of the perception of pasts. Humans are seen as a major geological agent during the Anthropocene – but how does the destructive facet of anthropogenic activities compare to natural destructive processes throughout the earth history and what are implications for the protection of geo-archives? I argue that anthropogenic disturbance is distinctively different from natural processes regarding the rates and the final fate of manipulated earth materials. Pushing the spatio-temporal assessment of the completeness of the geological record, e.g. by hiatus mapping, would help to identify a baseline for the protection of earth history records during the Anthropocene. Promoting Geoethics, in particular the sustainable knowledge exchange with society to create awareness for planetary history as a basis for a responsible handling of nature, is a key for an effective protection of earth history records. In particular, understanding psychological aspects of landscapes and the environment plays a vital role. Therefore, post-normal science approaches and the consideration of extended spheres of knowledge bear a great potential for future perspectives.

How to cite: Hildebrandt, D.: Fragile earth history ­– geological, societal and ethical perspectives on the planetary memory, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-12724, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-12724, 2022.

Global change has economic, environmental, and social impacts on water, energy, and food resources that threaten the ways of living of several communities across the globe. Moreover, the identification of those impacts at the local level constitutes a fundamental step in the process of designing and implementing proposals for the sustainable management of natural resources. The definition of what sustainability means is another key step in that direction. Within theoretical debates, three concepts have been identified: weak, strong, and super-strong sustainability. The first proposes to understand nature as “natural capital”, which should be treated as any other factor of production and can be exchanged with other forms of capital. The second highlights the existence of “critical natural capitals” that need to be conserved no matter the economic cost. The third, finally, introduces cultural, religious, historical, and ethical considerations, proposing the concept of “natural heritage” as an alternative to “natural capital”.

We propose an analytical framework that integrates those different approaches to sustainability, combining spatial data analysis and participatory dialog with actors from local communities. With this methodology, we aim to identify strategies towards the sustainable management of water, energy, and food resources, in the Pacific-Andes-Amazon altitudinal transects of two transboundary catchments of Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil (Mira-Mataje - 11,791km², and Putumayo - 125,563km²). We used remotely-sensed and globally available datasets alongside the spatially distributed assessment model Co$tingNature, to evaluate the natural capital. Then we quantified the interactions between natural capital, protected areas, and indigenous territories to identify critical areas for protection. Finally, we included the knowledge from leaders of Indigenous (Cofán, Awá, and Kamenzat), Mestizo-peasant, and Afro-descendant communities distributed along the altitudinal transects, regarding their natural heritage, and their perception of the challenges for its sustainable management.

We found a significant overlapping between critical natural capital and ancestral territories of ethnic communities and recognized some key anthropic intensive activities that challenge the conservation of those areas. We also identified the significant role that culture plays in the local communities’ efforts both to defend their territory and to find sustainable practices oriented towards the securing of collective welfare and the conservation of the environmental integrity of their natural heritage.

How to cite: Correa, A., Forero, J., Mulligan, M., and Codato, D.: Towards a “multi-level” sustainability analysis in Pacific-Andes-Amazon transboundary catchments., EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-8539, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-8539, 2022.

Climate change, volcanic eruptions, pandemics, financial crises, or large earthquakes; the problems societies must deal with nowadays are often complex and multifaceted. In a data-driven world, providing access to comprehensive, multidisciplinary data repositories to tackle such wicked problems is indispensable. Frameworks allowing such data access are therefore of particular importance. EPOS, the European research infrastructure for the solid Earth domain, is such a framework. It is a multidisciplinary, distributed research infrastructure that facilitates the integrated use of data, data products and services, and facilities from the European solid Earth science community. Although the importance of this undertaking is obvious, its implementation bears many challenges. We focus in our contribution at the most pressing issues from when data, products, and services are made accessible, to access principles, ethical issues related to its collection and use as well as with respect to their promotion.

How to cite: Marti, M., Haslinger, F., Silvia, P., Giuseppe, D. C., Glaves, H., and Dallo, I.: Addressing the challenges of making data, products, and services accessible: an EPOS perspective, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-13119, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-13119, 2022.

The inclusion of geoethics in the curricula contributes to young people's reflection on personal and social values and responsibilities, in order to raise awareness and develop appropriate behavior regarding the interaction of human activities with the Earth system (Georgousis et al., 2021; 2022). In modern societies, educational policy is implemented with the curricula being the mainspring. Recently, the new educational curricula that reflect the directions of educational policy in Greece for the next decade were prepared and announced. These curricula have received and are subject to various criticisms from scientific reviews of academic committees and educational institutions. In the midst of these, the question of whether they incorporate values of the natural world related to Geology and geoethical thought was developed, namely whether in an indirect and direct way they contribute to the sensitization and empowerment of students to the values of geoethics and consequently to the formation of environmentally and socially aware citizens. In order to answer this concern, research questions were posed regarding the presence of conceptual patterns, which refer to obvious or latent meanings for the promotion of geoethical values through the educational process. The methodology followed is the qualitative strategics with the technique of sensitizing content analysis, aimed to explore the thematic units and the expected learning outcomes of the new curricula of compulsory education of the Greek educational system. The texts were examined with the paragraph as the thematic unit. The characterization of the quantity was based on linguistic scales of related studies, according to which the results were characterized, identified and documented as they were estimated by the authors of the study. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) was used for the content analysis, specifically the quantification of the meaning patterns. Sixteen (16) new curricula were investigated. The investigation identifies a relatively small number of obvious conceptual patterns (codes) and a greater number of latent meanings in both social and natural sciences, revealing the limited potential for the development of geoethical thinking and geoethical values. Therefore, the lack of integration of geoethical values in the curricula of the next decade is noted, although recent researches document the lack of understanding of the geological heritage and the necessity for developing geoethical awareness of young people through the educational process.

How to cite: Georgousis, E., Savelidi, M., Savelides, S., Mosios, S., Holokolos, M.-V., and Drinia, H.: The inclusion of Geoethical Values in the Design of Educational Policy for the Next Decade: The Case of the Greek Educational System, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-5915, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-5915, 2022.

An analysis of the perceived image of science, scientists and inventions was conducted over  drawings made in 2010 by children for a calendar competition promoted by INGV in Italian primary schools. A similar competition was proposed in 2020 with a related purpose of analyzing the image children have of the world of science, its potential and future perspective.

The title of the 2010 competition was "Scienziato anche io! La Scienza e gli scienziati visti dai bambini” - I'm a scientist too! Science and scientists from the children point of view-

Children were asked to realize a drawing regarding: 1) How do you imagine a scientist? How do you imagine the daily activities of a researcher? 2) What is the invention you consider the most important among all those you know? 3) What would you invent?

We collected 986 drawings, realized by 6 - 10 years old children  from 48 schools distributed throughout the Italian territory.

For the 2020 competition we proposed: “La Scienza in crescita, immaginare la scienza del Futuro” - Growing Science, let’s imagine the science of the Future!-

We asked children to develop the following topics: 1) How do you figure a scientist life? 2) How do you imagine the daily research activities in the future? 3) and what tools will research work with? 4) if you were a scientist what would you invent?

In this case, the collection of drawings took place mainly during the months in which Italian schools were forced to distance learning because of the Covid pandemic crisis. Despite the difficulties, 28 primary schools participated by sending 350 drawings.

Drawings were coded and values stored in data sheets. A similar classification scheme was designed in order to be able to synthetically describe these sets of images and analyze it.  A coarse-grained, quantitative analysis were conducted on both sets of data in order to test and tune the classification scheme, as well as to infer some considerations which may would be comparable with studies in literature.

Work we present and compare the results of the two datasets set apart by ten years, highlighting differences, similarities, convergences. Do boys and girls image a scientist in the same way? and what are their relationships with science and technology? Do stereotypical images of science and scientists persist, or something is changing? Is there a gap between children’s perceptions and scientists’ reality? and how can this gap be filled? Has something changed in ten years?

From the data, a generally positive picture of the work of scientists emerge as well as a great level of confidence in the potential of science, capable to respond to needs and problems of the humanity and of the environment in which we live.

What arises from children's drawings has ethical, societal and social implications on global problems investing issues at the intersection between science, humanities, and social sciences, and provides us a direct and unconventional approach to analyze how we convey our science - a strategic topic for a suitable future of the humanity - to the players of the world of tomorrow.

How to cite: D'Addezio, G., Besker, N., Riposati, D., and Di Laura, F.: A comparison between 2010 and 2020 primary school student drawings on science and  scientists: what ethical and social implication emerge for future generations?, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-11795, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-11795, 2022.

For early career researchers (ECRs), it is of utmost importance to acquire various skills including the application of different methods under the umbrella of data science. However, curricula of scientific degrees do not necessarily always include all relevant methods in the field, and there are also new methodologies emerging. Besides organized training schools, self-organized learning groups are common in universities  for collaboratively acquiring new skills. Here, we present a concept that goes beyond in-person meetings and a prescribed curriculum to learn collaboratively, implemented for learning Machine Learning (ML) methods.

There is growing interest in ML methods applied to Earth system science. These tools are being incorporated rapidly in the curricula of many scientific degrees, however, there is a generation of ECRs who did not learn to apply or work with ML while obtaining their masters or doctorate degrees and are now interested in filling this hiatus. The Young Earth System Scientists (YESS) Community, a network of ECRs working in Earth system sciences, has organized a learning activity to bring together members of our community who want to apply these methods to their own data and scientific problems and have little or no knowledge on ML. 

The main goal of this activity was to provide ECRs of our community the opportunity and platform to engage in a guided and collaborative learning process via the participation in small learning groups. The activity was implemented fully virtual. Additionally, the purpose of working in groups was to allow group discussions on how to interpret the results in combination with traditional physics-based methods/knowledge. 

Each group had a  group leader which was in turn exchanging closely with other group leaders about the progress made and challenges encountered while keeping track of their group. The main challenges were working across time-zones, collaborative coding while learning, task distribution that ensured everyone learned from the activity. The activity not only proved to be useful for learning ML concepts, it was also a seedbed for projects which participants wish to continue working on. The skills and lessons learned from the organization included managing different time commitments among group members, working across time zones, learning-tasks distribution, ways to divide people into groups according to their research interests, advancing in knowledge coming from different backgrounds, writing a short proposal, literature review, providing a research project and reading material to stimulate an active learning mindset for students.  Here, we show what tools and learning strategies were most successful, results from the research projects and lessons learned that can be useful for other groups, networks or even teachers when designing such learning activities.  

How to cite: Mindlin, J., Yadav, P., Volosciuk, C., Rabanal, V., Attig Bahar, F., Koren, G., Ali, J., and Nzotungicimpaye, C.-M.: Fully virtual learning groups - pilot project on Machine Learning for early career researchers, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-3713, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-3713, 2022.