Big History: Geology in the interdisciplinary studies

Resumen del trabajo presentado al Friday Talk del ICM celebrado el 18 de diciembre de 2020.Big History is the attempt to combine, from a global and interdisciplinary point of view, all the knowledge we have about the past, from the beginning of the universe to the current day, in order to try to locate the situation of humanity from the widest viewpoint, including its challenges, problems and future prospects. The term “Big History” was first used by historian David Christian, his book titled “The maps of time” (Christian, 2005) is one of the main references in this topic. In Europe, at the same time, biochemist and anthropologist Fred Spier started a course and his book “Big History and the future of humanity” (Spier, 2015) is his main contribution. In the US, geologist Walter Alvarez showed how geology and planetary sciences have a fundamental role in explaining many of the events that are crucial in this Big History (Alvarez, 2016). It can be considered that interdisciplinarity is the basic concept for doing research in Big History. From my point of view, as a geologist, Earth science has a major role in Big History research and this has not been highlighted yet. Many of the interdisciplinary studies in which geology participates are published in the greatest impact scientific journals. They are investigations that deal with essential issues to understand our place in the Cosmos, and therefore deserve to be considered under the same conceptual framework. Big History offers this common framework to place such fundamental interdisciplinary studies. In this talk, we will present some cases of interdisciplinary studies in which geology has been used within the Big History framework, for instance, to explain relevant historical events. We will also review some studies that link geology and the history of life. There are endless issues where the connections between processes in the Earth System are essential to understand our own history and, in this way, to be able to make better decisions about our future as a species in this fragile situation for us.Peer reviewe