[Music] well thank you thank you very Bundy upon dia and obrigado of Flavia for the introduction I'm sure it was very good okay so I am going to speak about geo diversity do heritage and geo conservation for society and some of this some of you were at the course I gave the last two days so but there are quite a lot of I understand new people here who weren't at that course so some of this the beginning of this presentation will repeat I'm afraid some things that many of you will have heard already but because
there are new people I will I will I will say some of the things I've already said but towards the end I will get on to some new material so so bear with me I'd okay so in terms of what I intend to do I think that as geologists and geomorphologists we we haven't always been very good at explaining the value of our subject to society at large and so what I'm going to try and do today is to say what geo diversity is I know you all already understand that and then go on to
first of all geo diversity for society using what's known as an ecosystem services approach to describe the way of showing the public and decision makers that we literally couldn't have a modern society without the planets geo diversity and then so the first one is about geo diversity for society and secondly about geo heritage and geo conservation for society where I'm going to argue that the public has an interest in ensuring that the planets Giotto geo heritage is conserved for future generations and there be a few conclusions at the end okay so I usually start with
this slide because I think the best way to explain what geo diversity is is to start by explaining what gia diversity isn't and this is a sculpture from the institution where I am is associated with where I spent my career it's a sculpture called knowledge and at the center of this sculpture is a representation of the earth as a smooth steel sphere in other words this is a planet that has no geo diversity and as I'll explain today I think we were very fortunate that we don't have a planet that's like this in fact we
wouldn't be here if our planet was like this ok so fortunately the world isn't a perfectly smooth sphere composed of a single rock type it's highly diverse in terms of three things its geological materials its topographic variation its landforms and the physical processes operating on the planet and I usually say to people that if we understand volume and celebrate this is what we should be doing trying to understand celebrate and value the planets geo diversity that can enrich our lives and can enrich the lives of society as well if we can get this message across
so for those of you who don't know biodiversity is a well-known term now it's short for biological diversity and it's the variety of living nature whereas geo diversity which is short for geological and geomorphology cool diversity is a variety of nonliving or abiotic nature and you've got my definition at the bottom of that slide so in terms of of geo diversity we can think in terms of thousands of minerals hundreds of rock-types millions of fossil species 19,000 Dame soil types in the USA alone 800 in the UK a huge diversity of processes floovio coastal glacial
slopey only in hydrological volcanic and so on and a huge variation in topography and physical landscape character so that this is probably a better slide to actually which I hope is readable from the back here we are again we've got the regulating services 1 to 4 supporting services 5 to 8 provisioning services 9 to 12 sorry 9 to 15 cultural services 16 to 20 and knowledge services 21 to 25 and so I'm going to start with this example which is of what when I visited it was an aspiring Geopark of terrasse de Coverley Irish in
Portugal it's now a fully now full UNESCO global Geopark and this is a small interpretation center geological interpretation center in a small building but it's a it's a good example of to explain in a small way how geo diversity can contribute to the construction of a small building so here is a description of the major things the major ways in which diversity is contributed to that building so we've got our roof tiles at our clay plastic gutters and as you know plastic comes from oil it's got a metal handle and lock it's got plaster walls
it's got stone window surrounds the window frames themselves are look like wood but they're actually made of plastic and it's got glass in the windows which as you know comes from sand and it's got stone block paving outside so it's it's a diversity of materials have gone into constructing that building and it's all a biotic apart from the tree and the people so at a larger scale we have towns and cities like Philadelphia in the United States and you can see from this well no doubt there is some some wood in these buildings but by
and large this city and most cities are predominantly made from geological resources which have come out of the of the ground and it's a diversity of building materials as well you know you can see in these buildings everything from glass steel concrete there is bitumen on the on the roads and so on so it's a range of geological materials it goes into building the cities of the world and here we have some of the other ways in which geo diversity contributes to our lives these are examples of metals and industrial minerals so we've got this
is a cruise liner it's actually the Queen Queen Mary - which is mainly constructed from metal here we've got washing machines in a for sale in a shop here we've got a London bus and here we've got computer lab tablet and an old mobile an old-style mobile phone so these are all will use these things every day we take them for granted without the public certainly does but it it ought to be more aware I think of the diversity of geological materials that society uses in its everyday life so I said this was an old
old this is an older mobile phone and of course we're all we're all using smartphones now and it's remarkable to me anyway that smartphones contain half about half the non radioactive elements in the periodic table I think everyone who owns a smart phone should be made aware of this and they include a number of what are called rare earth elements such as indium tantalum and niobium and by definition because they're rare earth elements they are rare so so and they're difficult to recycle it's very difficult to take a mobile phone apart and recycle the material
in it very small amounts of material very expensive to do so they they are already rare and they could become scarcer and some of these elements are only found in certain parts of the world particularly in China and so one never knows what political situation may occur in the future and whether these sources of material will still be available into the future so this could have repercussions for future use of smartphones okay number 14 is ornamental products I don't seem to need to say very much about this but diamonds tanzanite geolock Gemological Society of America
and some examples of the way in which gemstones pressure precious metals and so on are used in in jewelry food and drink we have given you a couple of examples here this is a this is doesn't come out very well but this is a wine called greywacke from New Zealand it's a Sauvignon Blanc named after the local rock type greywacke and this is a Flint wine from it's a Bacchus wine from from England it actually was produced just a few kilometres from where I live so not a lot of people know that England produces wine
but it does and burial and storage this is a photograph from an English graveyard showing that we bury our dead often in cemeteries like this and it also helps to illustrate the range of stones that are used to commemorate the people buried in this cemetery a range of again geo diversity of tombstones number 18 cultural spiritual and historic meanings this is Mount Fuji in Japan which is sacred to the local Buddhist society alike many Hmong as many mountains are actually and the Japanese are one of the interesting thing about the Japanese is that they have
an integrated approach to the development of of gardens so here's an example called from the golden temple in Kyoto in Japan and you can see the integration of stone plants and water so almost all these gardens have got those three elements in a core in an integrated way put together as a as a garden landscape with the temple in the middle stone plants and water are crucial issues of Japanese traditional gardens and another garden in Japan in Kyoto in Japan is this one Ryo Caen gardens this is a Zen Buddhist temple and one of the
places in the garden is this amazing walled area this is all this is gravel white gravel which is raked into lines or curving around these stones in this area now this goes back centuries the construction of this garden nobody's quite sure what it all means but it's certainly interesting to the to the tourists who visit here you can see the number of tourists looking at gravel and stones okay number 19 is artistic inspiration artists are inspired to create music from the quality of landscape sculpture sculptors create artworks from stone and other materials artists paint landscapes
which inspire them to to to write poets compose poems about landscapes as well so this is an example from Canada of sculptures in in stone here's an example here's an example from Scotland these are quite fantastic features I think they're people down here so these these are people so these are very large sculptures of horses well the kelpies that they're put together through stainless steel metal and so again artists inspire to use geological materials to create sculptures and other pictures and fossils can also be the art be art this was an exhibition in in Oslo
a few years ago called fossil art and so some of these are trace trace fossils this is shrimp barrel and so on so all of these have been put together this exhibition was put together by this guy don't Dolph's shellack are German with who goes around the world taking casts of fossil sites that he believed artistically interesting number six is habitat provision the physical world the Geo diversity of the earth gives us a basis or gives plants and animals of different places in which they can survive give them their habitats yeah so here's an example
from South Africa on the left of plants growing along a crack in the granite rocks in that area so the plants have got a foothold in that place this is in the Algarve in Portugal where barnacles are cover have covered this particular set of rock outcrops in the tidal zone of that particular area so life-forms depend on suitable habitats in which to live so without geo diversity you would very little biodiversity in the world the two things are interlinked number 17 is Judea tourism and leisure there's an example of some coastal sea stacks in in
Canada this is actually in the Bay of Fundy in Canada on in eastern Canada it's actually the place it's got the biggest tidal range in the world it's something like 50 15 meters from low tide to high tide so a tremendous tidal range in that area and the reason for that is its topographic characteristic 16 environmental quality landscapes like this are important to society because they they are unescape if you like for many people from their urban environment number two is terrestrial processes this is a river in England it's what it's doing is draining water
from the catchment area and getting that water off the land and into the sea and a part of the hydrological cycle number five is soil as a growing medium here we've got an olive grove in Portugal and here also in Portugal is the old way in which olive oil used to be produced there was a donkey I think or attached to this and as it as it moved round these stone these stones were crushed the the olives so this is how olive oil used to be produced so it's partly historical of historical interest as well
and finally history of research this is a place called Hutton's unconformity which is 21 and 22 because it's important in the history of research because it was here that James Hutton in the 18th century worked out from this particular slide that the earth must be much older than that believed at the time which was only about six thousand years old he realized that to get this situation these these beds of science stone and shale in greywacke must have been laid down horizontally and somehow they've been up tilted put down below the wave so you've had
other material put on top so he said this must be take longer than 6,000 years to do so he was the first person to work out that most people at the time thought the world nor done in a few thousand years Hutton realized that earth processes are cyclic oh and the geological time is virtually unlimited okay moving on to geo heritage and deer conservation for society this is what I've called the Geo conservation equation what I have said what I've explained I hope is that geo diversity creates many values for society but it can also
be threatened by human actions such as engineering project so if something is a value that threatened then it creates a need for conservation so geo conservation is essential in order to protect geo sites natural landscapes and physical processes I'm sure we all would agree with that statement but does society agree I realize we are all part of society but does it would it agree as as a society ok here are some definitions of geo heritage which are those parts of the planets geo diversity that may be specifically identified as having geo conservation significance so geo
heritage is part of geo diversity and geo conservation is the action taken with the intent of conserving and enhancing geological and geomorphology cool features processes sites and specimens in terms of Geoparks this one is in Greece it's fossilized petrified tree twenty million year old buried by ash pyroclastic layers global Geoparks as many of you will know have three aims conservation of geo heritage geological education for the public and sustainable economic development and what I've described this as follows that the aim of Geopark global Geoparks is to allow local community in other words local society to
take ownership of their geological and other heritage by protecting it promoting it and by doing so gaining some sustainable economic benefit from it so there's no doubt that global Geopark the global Geopark concept is about geo conservation and education for society so in conclusion our planet has an incredible and magnificent geo diversity that ought to be understood and celebrated because quite simply our modern society today couldn't live without geo diversity and geo conservation of geo heritage is important because it protects the evidence for air fits during the evolution of life and local paler environments so
it's important to society that we that society knows how the earth was formed how its evolved through time how we got to our present position how life evolved into what we see today and that's done geo conservation is supported and funded by society through international national and local legislation and policy passed by elected representatives in many places it's done by public funding and it's done by local geo conservation initiatives on the ground including educational ones ok thank you for listening obrigado you want to read more then I have written a book thank you very much
[Applause] [Music] thank you very much for the excellent presentation and fertility we don't have time to questions because we need to continue the presentation thank you [Music] [Music] you
