Towards the geological past

Awareness of the necessity of environmental protection and nature conservation increases rapidly, in both industrial and developing countries. Measures taken by authorities do, however, not always contribute to a natural development of the environments that they want to protect. This is due partly to insufficient insight into the complexity of the natural processes playing a role in the various modern environments, partly to unawareness of natural changes that occur in the course of time due to lateral (and consequently also vertical) facies changes. A greater involvement of earth scientists, who are aware of the time factor, might contribute to more efficient and cost-effective measures.