APPLIED GEOSCIENCE
Figure 4 - List of critical (strategic) minerals identified by the US Geological Survey (Frontier et al., 2018) depicted on the periodic table of elements. If you do not know or remember all of these symbols for the elements, you are not alone (the author of this article belongs to your group), but as geologists, it is better to be familiar with critical minerals.
Mineral Resources
Everyday life and modern industries all depend on a vast number of minerals and elements extracted from Earth. Mineral exploration has always been at the heart of geoscience but the field is expected to grow as global demand for minerals will increase and critical (strategic) minerals will dominate national security and geopolitics. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020) forecasts that that while geoscientist jobs for oil and gas extraction may shrink by 13% between 2019-2029, workforce demand for mineral industries will increase by 32% for that period (AGI, 2020b). The US Geological Survey has published a list of critical minerals and elements (Figure 4) that require domestic exploration and production in order to reduce the country’s dependency on foreign sources. The respondents in this survey envisioned that improved knowl- edge of reserve estimates, geographic distributions, geological concentrations, and industrial recovery (and environmental
Table 2
impacts) of critical minerals and elements will be important tasks for geoscientists.
Natural Hazards
Natural hazards are normal geologic processes; however, their tragic impacts on human life, structures and properties have increased due to population growth and concentration in megacities prone to natural hazards as well as unpreparedness especially in developing countries. Natural hazards include a diverse set of events resulting from tectonic, hydrological, meteorological, and climatic processes (Table 2), and many of them are inter-related, such as offshore earthquake-tsunami coupling. Large populations and settlements are located close to the tectonic plate boundaries with records of big earthquakes and explosive volcanoes (Figure 5). Earthquake geologist Robert Yeats has called megacities like Tokyo, Manila, Tehran, Istanbul, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Santiago, Lima, and several others as cities sitting on “earthquake time bombs” (Yeats, 2015).
Table 2 - Classification of hazards according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), Brussels, Belgium
www.aipg.org
According to the World Health Organization, in the 20th century, more than 10 million people were killed as a direct result of natural hazards, includ- ing floods (6.8 million), earthquakes (1.8 million) and hurricanes or tropical cyclones (1.1 million) (Bryant, 2005). During 2000-2019, more than 7,000 geophysical disasters killed approxi- mately1.23 million worldwide (CRED, 2020). Natural disasters, especially those affecting megacities and infra- structures, indeed disrupt the world economy. Geoscientists and engineers can greatly contribute to studies of pre-
Jul.Aug.Sep 2021 • TPG 59
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