In biosciences we find practically all the time that mechanisms come from interactions across lots of disciplines. But of course biology is a couple of magnitudes more complex than earth sciences.
e.g. recent example we always thought that nerve propagation was by electrical impulse but there was an anomaly for over a century at why no heat was produced. It turned out the solution was to integrate fluid pressures (solitons) with electrical impulses at nodes spaced along the nerve providing a periodic shunt so the current model for nerves is now being proposed as piezoelectric.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton_mo ... uroscience