Health Geoscience

Background Geoscience defines the origins, properties, and structures of the earth, and their change over time. Population health risk assessment is the comprehensive assessment of health risks in the general population based on genetic, environmental and social and behavioral determinants of health. There is a renewed desire to explore the linkages between geoscience and population health and how geoscience can play a more active role in helping to contribute to health research and health policy decisions. Geoscience Knowledge Geoscience defines the origins, properties, and structures of the earth, and their change over time. Earth materials are the unconsolidated mineral deposits that overlay bedrock - dirt. They are derived from bedrock and, in Canada, have been further modified by physical actions of wind, water, ice, and gravity. Where the provenance (bedrock origins) of earth materials and processes that have affected them are known, properties relevant to health may be defined through geological maps and interpreted through geological models.

Relevance of Earth Materials
As host to the vast biomass at the earth’s surface, the properties, functions, and capacities of earth materials affect the health and diversity of all life. Earth materials serve to store, transmit, buffer, and modify groundwater, soil gases, and organic matter; they determine the natural distributions, abundances, and potential bioaccessibility of all elements, including nutrients and toxic agents; they host, support, and nourish the earth’s living systems; and, ultimately, they are both conduits and sinks for natural and human contaminants. Such properties, functions, and capacities are variable in both space and time, and they may be subject to rapid degradation and slow regeneration due to either natural or human actions, with the nature and magnitude of such changes being difficult to predict. In addition to health, the physical and chemical limits to growth defined by earth materials constrain the sustainability of agricultural, forestry, urban, and industrial activities, and they are relevant to the regulation of all human activities, including international trade.

Contributions
Geoscience knowledge of bedrock and earth materials contributes to environment and human health protection in three distinct ways:

• It underpins all studies of living systems by defining a stable, predictive foundation;
• It validates and constrains the use of analytical results in terms interdependencies among analytical protocol, earth material properties, and exposure pathways; and,
• It predicts environmental properties (e.g. soil pH, soil Rn gas, critical load capacities, soil fertility) and processes (e.g. buffering actions, water and gas modification and flow), and their potential for change.