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| In India at a world conference of women
scientists (front, third from left) with Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi (second from right), 1981. |
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The earth is a single huge system with many component
parts, including the atmosphere, the oceans, the crust, the mantle, and
the biosphere. Traditional scholarship approaches each of these separately
through such disciplines as meteorology, oceanology, and geology. But in
the 1970s, when global environmental problems began to attract attention,
scientists realized that they needed a new academic discipline that dealt
with the earth as a whole--earth studies.
The research by which I earned my doctoral degree in 1957 was intended to
determine the movement of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the oceans
by observing the behavior of this substance in the air and in sea water.
Today it is thought that, in addition to the natural exchange of carbon
dioxide between the atmosphere and the oceans and the carbon cycle of plant
photosynthesis and respiration, the various production activities of human
society have dramatically increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere. Today the study of the earth's carbon cycle is regarded as crucial
to understanding the causes of such climatic changes as global warming.
Because the earth is such a huge system, it is extremely difficult to get
an accurate picture of the movement of the atmosphere and oceans within
it. By tracking artificial radioactive substances that do not occur in nature,
we were able to follow this movement. The original purpose of that research
was to determine the extent of radioactive contamination from nuclear testing,
but another important outcome from the standpoint of earth studies was to
shed light on the workings of the earth as a system. |
