This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When engineers look to nature for inspiration, they often turn to living systems. The flight of birds has influenced aircraft design, gecko feet inspired new adhesives and lotus leaves led to the development of self-cleaning surfaces.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania now argue that engineers should look somewhere else in nature as well: the ground beneath their feet. In a perspective paper published in Physical Review E, the team introduces geomimicry, a framework that asks how soils, sediments and other Earth-mediated materials have been shaped over geologic time and how those processes can inspire the next generation of sustainable materials. "Soils have been evolving locally in different places under climate, temperature cycles, rain, dryness and all of that," says Paulo Arratia, Eduardo D.
Glandt Distinguished Scholar and professor of mechanical engineering and applied mechanics (MEAM). "We want to learn those rules so that we can re-engineer materials." The paper marks a milestone in a collaboration that has unfolded over nearly a decade. Douglas Jerolmack, Edmund J. and Louise W.
Kahn Endowed Term Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and professor in MEAM, Arratia and their collaborators had been studying seemingly unrelated questions: Why do some mudslides behave like flowing sand while others behave more like hair gel? How do repeated wetting and drying cycles strengthen soil? Why does mud collected along the Delaware River give Major League baseballs exactly the right amount of grip?
Each project uncovered a small piece of a much larger puzzle. Rather than presenting a single experimental breakthrough, the team's most recent paper connects years of research into a new way of thinking about Earth materials, one the team hopes will encourage researchers from soft matter physics, materials science, mechanical engineering and earth science to tackle common problems together. For lead author Shravan Pradeep, a postdoctoral researcher working with Arratia and Jerolmack, geomimicry began with a different way of looking at soil.
"My background is in chemical engineering and materials science," he says. "I started working on Earth science problems after I came to Penn." Rather than asking how to classify different kinds of soil, Pradeep wondered whether the same principles engineers use to design new materials could explain how natural soils acquire their remarkable properties. That perspective became one of the central ideas behind geomimicry: understanding materials by what they do rather than what they are made of.
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