Geomimicry: Emergent Dynamics in Earth-Mediated Complex Materials

Abstract

Soils and sediments are soft, amorphous materials with complex microstructures and mechanical properties, that are also building blocks for industrial materials such as concrete. These Earth-mediated materials evolve under prolonged environmental pressures like mechanical stress, chemical gradients, and biological activity. Here, we introduce geomimicry, a new paradigm for designing sustainable materials by learning from the emergent and adaptive dynamics of Earth-mediated matter. Drawing a parallel to biomimicry, we posit that these geomaterials follow evolutionary design rules, optimizing their structure and function in response to persistent natural forces. Our central argument is that by decoding these rules: primarily through understanding the emergence of novel exotic properties from multiscale interactions between heterogenous components, we can engineer a new class of adaptive, sustainable matter. We propose two complementary approaches here. The top-down approach looks to nature to identify building blocks and map them to functional groups defined by their mechanical (rather than chemical) behaviors, and then examine how environmental training tunes interactions among these groups. The bottom up approach seeks to leverage and test this framework, building earth materials one component at a time under prescribed fluctuating stresses that guide assembly of complex and out-of-equilibrium materials. The goal is to create materials with programmed functionalities, such as erosion resistance or self-healing capabilities. Geomimicry offers a pathway to truly design Earth-mediated circular materials, with potential applications ranging from climate-resilient soils and smart agriculture to new insights into planetary terraforming, fundamentally shifting the focus from static compositions to dynamic, evolving systems that are mediated via their environment.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Timeline of soft earth engineering development: from ancient earth constructions to modern engineered composites. The oldest standing adobe structures in the world are the granaries at the Ramesseum, built around 1300 B.C. by Ramses II near Luxor, Egypt. Adobe construction techniques spread across civilizations; one notable example is the Tabo Buddhist Monastery in the Spiti Valley, India, constructed around 996 C.E. In 1776, the French engineer and physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb published his now-famous essay Essai sur une application des règles de Maximis et de Minimis à quelques Problèmes de Statique relatifs à l’Architecture, discussing soil shear strength. Building on these concepts, Christian Otto Mohr conceptualized the Mohr Circle in 1882 and later published it in 1900. The Mohr–Coulomb failure criterion relates shear stress ($\tau$), normal stress ($\sigma$), and cohesion ($c$) through the friction angle ($\alpha$) as: $\tau=c+\sigma$tan($\alpha$). Twenty-five years later, Carl Terzaghi’s Erdbaumechanik (1925) launched modern soil mechanics, incorporating concepts from geophysics, physics, and mechanics, and establishing the fundamental concept of effective stress—thereby distinguishing geotechnics from other branches of engineering mechanics. A foundational paper in 1958 roscoe1958yielding and the textbook that followed in 1968 schofield1968critical provided a unified constitutive model explaining the complete mechanical behavior of soil, from initial loading to ultimate failure, based on the principles of plasticity theory and effective stress. Today, these foundational ideas have evolved to support the design of adaptive and resilient materials by engineering multiscale soil composites, where microscopic interactions are tuned to achieve desired macroscopic mechanical properties mikofsky2025physicochemical. Image Courtesy: Pixabay; Wikimedia; and Development Workshop Digital Archive under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial.
• Figure 2: Drawing parallels between biomimicry and the proposed geomimicry framework. The biomimicry framework focuses on understanding the final biological functions that emerge through selective traits evolved under external pressures, and applying these insights to engineering design. The example illustrated shows how the need to catch prey from water led to the evolution of the kingfisher’s long, wedge-shaped beak, which minimizes drag at the air–water interface, a principle later applied to reduce drag in high-speed bullet trains. Similarly, the proposed geomimicry framework mirrors this concept: soil functions arise from evolved configurations of soil microstructure, shaped by real environmental pressures. This framework can be used to design multicomponent, multifunctional soil-mimetic composites. Image courtesy: Pixabay; images adapted and modified from literature hochman2021diversewhite2020watersmercina2022synthetic.
• Figure 3: Mechanical functions enable mapping of natural soil materials to soft particulate analogs. The fundamental building blocks of soils are mapped to their analogous soft particulate systems through their similar mechanical functional groups. Model soft particulate systems that mimic non-swelling clay (e.g., kaolinite), swelling clay (e.g., bentonite), and silica sand particles include colloidal gels (e.g., depletion-induced colloidal attraction), granular hydrogels, (e.g., carbopol), and granular beads, respectively qazi2022methodswilson2014influencezheng2015latexiouras2018particle. Silt particles and their analogous colloidal particulate systems exhibit complex interparticle potentials and are sensitive to small environmental changes, such as the presence of salts or polymers, resulting in tunable mechanical functions. The attraction and frictional mechanical functional groups are depicted as rolling and sliding constraints, respectively, as recently treated in suspension rheology community guy2018constraintsingh2020shearsingh2022stress.
• Figure 4: Mapping geological systems to geomimetic applications using mechanical functional groups. We illustrate the complete geomimicry mapping using two natural systems explored in the literature: landslides and marshy soils. The image shows landslides in Big Sur, California (Courtesy: US Geological Survey). The flow and deformation of landslides can be modeled using a zeroth-order soil system composed of sand (frictional), clay (attractive), and water (viscous). Landslides and debris flows form rills that generate soil aggregates upon water evaporation (inset SEM brevik2015interdisciplinary). Similarly, the model soil system dries to produce aggregates resembling those found in natural rills kostynick2022rheology. The mechanism of resilient aggregate formation follows fractal-like capillary condensation, creating solid bridges across multiple length scales seiphoori2020formation. Here, a new mechanical function—cohesion—emerges, which can be leveraged to engineer resilient, soil-based composites with tunable mechanical properties by adjusting the attraction-to-friction ratio and modulating drying dynamics lasting2024terrene (Courtesy: Tensar International Corporation). Marshy soils, which contain a high concentration of clay (attractive component), exhibit strong shear-thinning behavior and can be easily processed. Upon drying, sparse sand particles impart microscale friction, while the clay matrix provides nanoscale adhesion. This combination of flow, friction, and adhesion properties makes marshy muds promising for sustainable lubricant applications pradeep2024soft. Moreover, marshy muds exist as fragile gels, which can be studied in the laboratory to examine how mechanical functional groups evolve under gravitational settling seiphoori2021tuning. Insights from such studies can inform the understanding and stabilization of pharmaceutical formulations and other industrial products harich2016gravitational.