Nature - autonomous learning

the dis/unity of geography 201Box 4.3 INTELLECTUAL DISPUTES IN PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHYPhysical geography, like any other field of intellectual inquiry, ischaracterised by disputes between practitioners over any and allaspects of the process and the results of research. Some of the mostintense disputes relate to the quality and significance of evidence:what does a given body of evidence tell us about the biophysicalworld? If physical geographers were robots rather than what they are(i.e. thinking, feeling people) then one might imagine disputes overevidence could be quickly and ‘rationally’ resolved. But the reality ismore complicated. Sugden (1996) provides a fascinating example.In the mid-1990s there were two rival accounts of the history of theEast Antarctic Ice Sheet involving physical geographers andgeologists. One school of thought (the ‘dynamic’ school) insistedthat the ice sheet largely disappeared during the late Pliocene period.Another school (the ‘static’ school) argued that the ice sheet hadbeen remarkably stable, even during periods of naturally increasedtemperature. Both schools presented evidence to support theirrespective cases, and it was clear that deciding which one was correctwas of more than academic importance. After all, if we are currentlyexperiencing ‘global warming’ then it’s important to know if the‘dynamists’ are right since large sea-level rises (among other things)would be a likely future scenario worldwide such is the amount ofH 2O locked-up in Antarctica. Sugden examines how those in thedynamist camp – which was dominant through the 1980s – ‘dealtwith’ the evidence presented by the stabilists. That evidence was notonly wide ranging. It also challenged the main factual basis of thedynamist perspective, the so-called Sirius Group deposit evidencetaken from thirty-three high-altitude sites in the TransantarcticMountains. Diatom analysis of the Sirius tills and gravels suggestedthat temperate forest had existed during the late Pliocene, akin tothat in Patagonia today. Against this, the stabilists presented newevidence in 1994 that suggested that the diatoms were notindigenous to Antarctica and were airborne ‘imports’ to Antarctica.Confronted with this troubling new evidence, Sudgen shows how the