"Soft Earth Geophysics"

We live on a soft matter landscape. The Earth's surface is a thin skin of particulate and living material that is fragile; excited by a broad spectrum of perturbations, Earth's surface flickers across many metastable states. Understanding the Soft Earth is existential, to manage the risk of increasingly dangerous natural hazards such as landslides and earthquakes and to learn to build with sustainable geomaterials. Yet, historically there has been little exchange between theoretical physics and observations of Soft Earth states and dynamics, like there is in other fields such as astrophysics. Existing models are largely phenomenological or empirical. The emerging field of "Soft Earth Geophysics" involves the translation of emerging frameworks in soft matter physics to geophysics, while also shining light into dark corners of physics that may influence other areas of science.


See our manifesto on Soft Earth Geophysics here.

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