Big questions in geoscience and challenges for the geoscience community

Geoscience is relatively underrated in our public education. Public perception of big questions in science is often related to cosmology and physics. However, geoscience deals with its own big questions and offers a body of knowledge that directly benefits society. Twenty areas of significant questions, challenges and opportunities in geoscience articulated in a survey of 136 geoscientists are reported here. Global warming and the petroleum industry top the list. Prediction and mitigation of natural hazards, especially big earthquakes and explosive volcanoes, tackling environmental degradation and pollution of various types, as well as exploration of rare earth metals and energy minerals essential to everyday life are among the practical topics of study. Some of the big questions pertain to the most distant geologic past – Hadean and Eo-Archean times (4.5–3.5 Ga) – during which the primitive Earth’s internal structure, crust, atmosphere, oceans and biosphere were formed. Other questions concern those physical parts of the Earth – the mantle and the core – that are not directly accessible to us. Geoscience is far from integrating crustal phenomena and plate tectonics with the dynamics, heterogeneities and evolution of the mantle. Causes of palaeoclimate changes and mass extinctions, and the relationships between these two remain fertile fields of research. Extraterrestrial influences such as lunar gravitational stresses and meteorite impacts should be better integrated into Earth system science. Many of the big questions in geoscience are multidisciplinary and require various methods and big data analytics