70 years of tech: Does it serve science or separate us from it? My take as an EGU media professional

The useful part

Now, in my third year at EGU, I find myself looking out over our scientific community with a mixture of reverence and unease. Day after day, as I read through press releases, editorial submissions, blog submissions, and newly published papers across our division journals, I am confronted by quite the paradox. We live in an era of unprecedented computational power, high-resolution Earth system simulations, and endless satellite data streams, yet the human connection to science feels somewhat… fragile to say the least.

How it works

• Union in 2024 as a media professional, my primary mandate felt straightforward: democratising scientific understanding and building durable, trustworthy bridges that connect scientists, researchers,...
• In April 1950, atmospheric scientists Jule Charney and Ragnar Fjørtoft, working alongside mathematician John von Neumann, used the ENIAC computer to produce the world's first numerical weather forecast...
• To answer this question, we have to look back at what actually happened seventy years ago, when the relationship between technology and Earth science was forged.
• Within that same decade, the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and TIROS-1 in 1960 opened the satellite era, streaming raw observations directly into digital systems, while early hyd...

Example or evidence

• By 1954, operational digital forecasting had begun, and in 1956, meteorologist Norman Phillips published the world's first general circulation model and managed to prove that digital computers could...

Details worth keeping

I keep returning to one question: after decades of continuous technological development, is technology really serving the core mission of the sciences, or is it rewriting that mission and driving a wedge between scientific truth and human understanding and advancement? The mid-1950s marked the birth of computational geosciences.