The drama of the Earth

The mystery for me reading NYT's Kenneth Chang on the early Earth is how my old geography lessons ended up so dull.

Hours that should have been packed full of dramatic incident: exploding volcanoes, life-threatening asteroid impacts, battling tectonic plates and scary earthquakes mostly involved being droned at by PE teachers who only taught it as a sideline.

Yet Earth Sciences is very exciting stuff: just in the last year Oxford earth scientists have told me about giant ancient tsunamis, Britain's biggest meteorite impact, a unique planetary nursery, the mysteries of volcanic pollution, and the remains of ancient animals.

So why did I [and the rest of class 4b] find it so hard to stay awake during talk of subduction zones and glaciation?

Partly, I think, because geological processes were reeled off as a quasi-religious catechism rather than as dynamic physical and chemical processes happening right beneath our feet: we were never required to think critically about the forces and phenomena involved - much less model, recreate or play with them.

Also, such subjects as volcanoes, freeze-thaw and erosion were taught as separate entities, never joined up to reflect the drama of our planet through its many different ages.

Neither did we learn how these other Earths were reimagined (often wrongly!) by early explorers and scientists from the evidence available on the surface or what this evidence might tell us about the formation of other worlds.

Sadly, today's children are unlikely to learn about such wonders as, from what I gather, there's little place for these topics on the UK's National Curriculum.

It seems an odd state of affairs that there's so much furore over teaching our children about the origins of 'Britishness' in history and literature but none at all about teaching them about the dramatic origins of the Earth itself.

Image: erupting volcano from US National Parks Service. 

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