Geosphere-Atmosphere-Biosphere Integration

Abstract

‘The marvellous thing about the face of the earth is that it is such a mess.’ Richard Fortey (2004: 432) makes this remark near the end of his ‘intimate history’ of the earth. Messiness is not a description that would have occurred in the 1790s to Hutton. He had sensed order, harmony, and a ‘beautiful economy’ in the physical world. Fortey, though, is not using the word ‘mess’ in a derogatory sense. Nor is he denying that there is order in the systems geology describes. He is thinking of things that, as an eminent geologist, he knows and loves best: rocks. Many different geological and biological processes in many different time periods have left marks on particular locales. Understanding these presents daunting challenges. Messiness activates ordering impulses. It led to the familiar typecasting of rocks as igneous, metamorphosed, or sedimentary (and to the categorization of geologists as ingenious, metaphoric, or sedentary [Anderson, 2007: 189]). It stimulates the much more complicated task of ordering earth-history events such as glaciation, the movement and shifting alignments of plates, the evolutionary links among species over time and the extinctions of these, and atmospheric change.