Welcome to the third and last section of my blog post on earth science in the 20th century! We’re here to close out the Cold War and speculate on the future, now with even more sources for your reading pleasure.

World War II was the beginning of a decades-long partnership between the U.S. Navy and civilian oceanographers that would last into the Cold War, completely redefining what the field was capable of and producing some of the defining theories about the earth that we herald today.  And yet, it eventually began to fall apart.

In the last few months I’ve had many discussions with people about the history of the Earth Sciences – geology, geophysics, oceanography, and more – and how the emergence of these fields as respectable and important scientific institutions is tied directly to major political events in the twentieth century.  With that in mind, I’ve decided to write a series of posts elaborating in depth on this topic: how the rise of oil and the experience of WWI changed geology, and how WWII and the Cold War shaped oceanography, and how we still feel the effects of these events in the field today.  

I am here to dispel some myths about science as a profession, and the people that practice it.  

In fact, I think several people like this blog!

Why do we insist on projecting a hierarchy onto the sciences?  And when we do it, does it say more about the sciences or about ourselves?

I am writing about the Dolomites, and specifically a region known as Südtirol or Alto Adige.  This is an autonomous province within Italy, and is different in many ways from other parts of Italy. This post is not about Italy as a whole.  The history of the Südtirol, like many sections of the Alps, is complex and more than worthy of its own post. If you were wondering about the intricacies of life in Europe’s most famous mountains, this is the place for you.

To say I was excited to visit the Alps as a geologist would be an understatement. The Alps are, without a doubt, the site of the oldest geologic investigations in the world thanks to their fortuitous location in Western Europe. Modern geologic theory about how mountain-building works was formulated in the Alps, thanks to the large amount of scientists in the area and the mountains’ relative accessibility thanks to centuries of occupation in almost every valley.  I visited the Alps before I became a geologist, and was captivated by the terrain I saw even if I couldn't articulate why.  As I returned a trained geologist (with a lot to learn), I got so much more out of my time in the Alps.