Findings and Recommendations - Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science - page 92

limited by the feasible dimensions of laboratory apparatus, usually a few meters
or less, as well as the duration of the experiments. Moreover, it is often
impossible to reproduce in the laboratory the range of interactions among
processes required to emulate natural phenomena. For these reasons, the study of
terrestrial processes almost always requires extensive field observations. One
especially effective strategy for dealing with natural complex systems is to focus
observations on carefully chosen areas—natural laboratories—where
representative behaviors can be investigated in appropriate context and detail and
with the appropriate complement of expertise and instrumentation.
Designating specific areas for special scrutiny has several advantages. It
facilitates the coordination of activities across multiple groups of investigators,
encouraging the types of multidisciplinary studies that are often essential to
understanding complex processes and system behaviors. It also provides a long-
term basis for capitalizing on field-based research. If the investigations are well
directed and the data properly analyzed and archived, then the return on previous
research investments can be compounded as more data are collected. Each
observational study within the natural laboratory adds to the database, improving
the context for future work. This coordinated, multidisciplinary approach is
especially desirable when field operations are logistically complicated and
expensive, as in the collection of spatially dense data sets and the monitoring of
phenomena over extended time intervals. Synoptic studies of natural laboratories
furnish an important observational base for developing theoretical and numerical
models of complex natural systems, and they yield the essential data by which
these models are ultimately validated. They also provide the facilities for
involving students and teachers in participating in field-based research (see
“Education” below).
The establishment of natural laboratories has become commonplace in
programmatic studies of the seafloor sponsored by NSF's Ocean Sciences
Division, where coordinated, multidisciplinary research in specified regions has
proven to be an effective strategy for studies of seafloor processes and systems
and has become essential to the efficient use of ships and other expensive
oceanographic facilities. 13 The natural laboratory concept is also the basis for
NSF's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network,
13 An early (1974) example was Project FAMOUS (French-American Mid-Ocean
Undersea Study), which coordinated an extensive program to make the first direct
observations of seafloor spreading on a segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. OCE's RIDGE
program is developing a set of seafloor observatories at various points on the global
spreading system, beginning with sites on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, and the MARGINS
science plan calls for a concentration on a set of “focus study areas” targeted for intensive,
multidisciplinary programs of research that can exploit the synergy among field
experiments, numerical simulations, and laboratory analyses.