Badania geofizyczne w rozwiązywaniu problemów cywilizacyjnych istotnych dla Polski

In view of the challenges faced by geophysical research in the future decades and the observed decline in interest in this field of study in Poland, it is necessary to mobilize the geophysical environment. One of the main causes of the crisis in the popularity of this field of study are changes in the economic paradigm, in which an important determinant and goal of activities is the declared departure from fossil fuels, especially coal and oil. Obviously, this has a direct impact on the prospects of geophysical research, whose main contractor on a global scale is the oil industry. With the depletion of the best available deposits, there is a need to reach for deposits that were increasingly difficult to discover and exploit, which contributed to the progress in geophysical research methods that followed the development of technology and information methods - the basis of modern geophysical analyses. The announced definitive departure from fossil fuels coincided in Poland with the end of the shale-gas boom and the announcement of the program of resigning from coal mining. These announcements aroused the belief that the demand for geophysical research will also expire in the coming years together with the prospects for financing such research. However, this belief is wrong. A significant stream of funds will be directed at the development of geophysical research on a global scale, and the current sponsors of utilitarian geophysical research will occupy new niches on the market, e.g. in the accumulation of energy, storage of greenhouse gases and the search for raw materials, the lack of which is increasingly felt by the most developed economies. Along with the growing awareness of the deepening climate crisis and the destruction of the natural environment engulfing the planet, the need increases to recalculate the environmental costs of economic activity, in which broadly understood geophysical sciences can undoubtedly help. Geophysical analysis of huge datasets requires modern computational methods such as numerical modelling, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The development of these fields will therefore be necessary, but also a difficult challenge for the scientific community in Poland. In this work, we will indicate mainly the prospective areas of the economy and the science, related to the broadly understood energy transformation that requires a significant share of geophysical research. The review of the issues and methodology of current geophysical problems and proposed solutions has been arranged in accordance with the directions of research in the field of earth sciences, subjectively highlighting the tasks that seem to be the most promising and/or scientifically attractive. The text deals with the issues related to climatology, hydrology and hydrogeology, environment, geological hazards, renewable and non-renewable energy sources, waste storage, energy storage, critical raw materials, and the structure and physical condition of the Earth’s crust.