Basic Earth Science and Society - Basic Research Opportunities in Earth Science - page 2

Andreas, as well as maintain the reference grids used by land surveyors. Probing
the Earth's past through a detailed reading of the geological record is furnishing
information about the behavior of climate and ecological systems that will be
crucial to a future in which human activities become ever more potent forces of
global environmental change.
The linkage between basic and applied research is growing stronger because
some of the toughest problems facing the United States and the world at large
require a deep understanding of the physical, chemical, and biological processes
that govern terrestrial systems. These practical issues cannot be addressed
successfully without a vigorous program of basic research across the full spectrum
of Earth science. Moreover, they call for substantial enhancements in the
methodologies for integrating observations from the various disciplines into
system-level models with predictive capabilities. Given the improved technical
means for acquiring vast new data sets and modeling complex dynamic systems,
the opportunities for furthering these aspects of the Earth science agenda have
never been better.
Role of the National Science Foundation
Four federal departments and three independent federal agencies have
significant activities in Earth science ( Appendix A ). These organizations
support a mixture of basic and applied research, including multidisciplinary
studies of mission-oriented problems ranging from environmental remediation
and climate change assessment to anticipating the behavior of active faults and
volcanoes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) plays a crucial role in this
milieu as the sole agency whose primary mission is basic research and education.
Only the NSF, through its Earth Science Division (EAR), provides significant
funding for investigator-driven, fundamental research in all of the core disciplines
of Earth science. 1
The future of EAR is important because this NSF division now shoulders an
increasing burden of the national effort in basic Earth science ( Figure 1.1 ). In
terms of buying power, the annual expenditures of EAR have grown about a
factor of two during the last 20 years, reaching $97 million in 1999 (see
Appendix A for a breakdown). However, the past few years have seen a
substantial decline in the support of Earth science by other federal
1 EAR is part of NSF's Geoscience Directorate, which also comprises the divisions of
Atmospheric Science and Ocean Science. This report employs NSF terminology: Earth
science is the subset of geoscience concerned with the study of the Earth's solid surface,
crust, mantle, and core. The disciplines of Earth science include geology, geophysics,
geochemistry, geobiology, hydrology, and related fields.