Geo-science

Geology is the general term for the various branches of geoscience, which are themselves broken down into specialties. I am a geologist. I studied them all, but not very deeply since specializing requires at least a Masters and more likely a Doctorate to take the title that goes with it.

A Paleontologist covers ancient to modern life forms and their remnants. Most of those are shells, some are skeletons, and very few are dinosaurs from the movies. That dinosaur specialty is very popular with kids, so it gets funding and you better speak Spanish since the best digs are in Argentina. You can get started in Canada, the tundra, and Wyoming, of course. If you opt to study mammals from after the big KT impact, there's lots of them found in South Dakota and California worth studying. Many of the bones sitting in Berkeley's paleo storage warehouse are largely untouched, just waiting for a paleotologist to get started. Its not QUITE as sexy as dinosaurs, but some of these critters were hunted by man, and the weather is better here.

Seismologists get to travel a lot. There are earthquakes faults in many countries, often underneath major cities. Seismologists do some very high end math, trenching through old landslides for historic data, and using geophone instruments in various locations to communications networks to report their findings. My friend Stacey got her doctorate in that. The single most unlucky person I've ever met. She says she's very lucky to survive so many disasters, but I'd compare her to Teela Brown from the Ringworld books. Not quite lucky enough to not be there in the first place. Stacey spent years doing Fourier Transform and Analysis calculations. She spent a couple years programming in Fortran to try and make use of sensing data for the deep crust 100-160 km down in relation to earthquakes which affect the surface. She didn't think it was a big deal but I was rather impressed. Her modelling work on fracturing and seismicity landed her a job at a major oil company, since it had applications to finding really deep pools of oil. My feeling on seismic work is to focus on earthquake damage predictions and timing for highly populated places, like the West coast of the USA and Canada and Japan, Taiwan, Italy, and Indonesia, where big quakes can kill a lot of people. China has had some killer quakes in the last decade as well, some of them quite devastating. Good data would help identify which buildings are unsafe and what can be retrofitted and what standards need to be updated so new buildings might not fall down. In Chile and Peru, it is now common for adobe brick buildings to have layers of bamboo between them since it provides tensile strength, like cheap rebar. Chile and Peru are on a subduction boundary so quakes there tend to throw things into the air. The boundary on the Oregon and Washington coast is the same. Big vertical movement, 9.6 quakes possible. I think offering data for potential quakes is a valuable contribution. I wish my friend was doing that, but we all make our choices. She's got a family to care for. Even science has to take a back seat to raising kids. I used to have a terrible crush on her, but I got over it.

Geochemists often end up working in mining. They find the minerals and predict where the rare earth elements have ended up. Thanks to high tech relying on obscure and very rare elements, there's a lot of need for geochemists and mining engineers. The gold mines where I live are starting to reopen. There's lots of lithium over in a particular valley in Nevada and more in Bolivia, needed for electric car batteries. Many types of solar panel use rare earth elements, but the best chemistry version can pull the needed elements out of agricultural runoff here in California. If our Wastewater engineers were aware, they'd probably be selling them. Of course, the patent holders for that design would need to have a manufacturer signed to making them rather than bickering forever. Mining Engineering, Geochemistry, and Economic Geology all tie in together so a scientist with one of the degrees usually gets the other too. Petroleum geology is a further specialization, but honestly I think we already have all of those that we need until the oil runs out. While there's money in the short term, eventually the price of extraction will cut profits so badly you're better off doing something else with your time. Gold is extremely valuable, but how many gold miners are there? Not many. Too much competition and too refined an industry for the big profits of the old days.

Another branch of geology is Vulcanology. This is not the study of Hephaestus and how worship of technology has made the crippled and ugliest of Greeko-Roman gods relevant once more, though it has. Nor is it the study of pointy eared Austistic aliens on bad scifi TV shows. Vulcanology is the study of volcanoes. You might think that volcanoes are old and silly, but Mount Pinatubo and Mount Unzen and quite a few other volcanoes remain very much active and a threat to modern populations. And sometimes they blow up really big. I'll set aside the very well publicized calderas and super-volcanoes. They go off very rarely and they change climate for years or decades. The smaller ones are still a major problem. 

Mount Aetna is due to go off soon, btw. Anytime, really. As the people living near volcanoes tend to be brave to the point of suicide, I recommend, as a scientist, to give them the warning then leave them to their fate. Some people are just Darwin Awards. That's how it is. Quite a few people stayed in the shadow of Mount Pinatubo, and others tried crossing rivers of boiling mud and barely had time to scream before they died boiled alive. Really horrible way to go. The ash from a volcanic eruption stays hot for days to weeks depending on how thick it is. If its really thick, it will melt back together, making a rock called an Ash Tuff. This rock is commonly found on the surface near volcanoes and is often exposed as cliffs since it typically erodes fast. There's a really nice one north of Bishop, CA. Welded Tuff, which stayed hot longer so is stronger, makes a good building material. The Romans used it a lot, and they weren't the only civilization that did. The heads on Easter Island are made of Welded Tuff. Its used in buildings on Scotlands, Wales, Saxony, various parts of America, and the American Indians carved homes out of it in some cases. Then they died from silicosis, but that's another story...

Vulcanology impacts cities in a similar way to earthquakes. There are big volcanoes all around the Pacific Rim, and they do erupt. They're reasonably easy to predict these eruptions most of the time, since they occur with patterns of detectible phenomenon, such as harmonic tremors which remote sensing equipment will pick up. The job itself is still evolving but is mostly that of monitoring and maintenance of the detection grids and their data. Only the really stupid or unlucky folks die. The French couple Maurice and Katia Krafft were studying Mount Unzen and brought a bunch of news photographers with them. They got hit by a pyroclastic flow seconds after answering this question: "That's a big cloud. Are we safe here?" "Oh, we're fine. It's not coming this way. FOOOM! shrrch!".

The Krafft's were one of the founding examples of the Darwin Awards, in case you were wondering. This above video is one that will make a bar full of drunk geologists go silent. No really. Nothing scares us more than Pyroclastic flows, which is what we call that cloud. Its 1200'C and will burn your body to cinders in moments, but its one of the most painful ways to die that's known. We consider Vulcanology to be a job for very brave men and women. Most geology jobs are about hiking and studying stuff long after it has happened. Vulcanology is often stuff happening now or very recently and on a scale that you sometimes can't escape in time. Very brave. Darwin is in our purview. We don't want to get those kinds of Awards.

The final specialization of geoscience is that of ancient environments, known as Stratigraphy. Please note that we don't call ourselves "Environmental Scientists" or "Climatologists" because that's a new and unrelated discipline which is, honestly, in serious need of proper review. Many of its practitioners are blatant liars and incompetents and deserve to be charged with fraud and have their funding recovered by the National Science Foundation.

Con Men who can bandy math around go into Climatology because it gets you into the cocktail and talk show circuit and its biggest funders are non-scientists who can't do the math at all, so can't tell they're being lied to and cheated. There are very few geologists listed as sources for the famous climate report of 2006, the one that claimed the Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2011. Ahem. There were many insane and unsupportable claims made in that publication, and it's fit only for lining a bird cage. Most of the conclusions are not supported and the ones that are are really quite mundane and well known to Glaciologists. I would put Climatologists and their publications at the same level of competence as the Red Scare documents fabricated by that demagogue Joseph McCarthy.

Ironically, it seems McCarthy was right in the long run. We've gone Socialist despite it failing everywhere it's been tried. Profit Motive works. Socialism always fails because always leads to laziness. The trouble is that unlimited Capitalism leads to mass unemployment, which then feeds retaliatory Socialism and or civil war and govt sponsored assassination of political enemies. We're seeing the consequences of Useless Eaters in our current failing model of socialism, and the burden on the Working Class is breaking Capitalism and breaking any hope of fair taxation. This leads to the sort of division that end in violence. I don't want that.

I like to see real science held to a higher standard than popular cults like Climatology handwave past. And for clarification: yes, Global Warming is a fact. It happened 19,500 years ago and triggered the big melting and sea level rises. Most of the flood myths are a direct result of glacial ice dams breaking, resulting in huge and often periodic floods all over the world, downstream from glaciers.

Current climate issues like high temperatures, droughts, storms, and other extremes? Completely typical according to stratigraphic records. Climate is often variable. Predictable climate is actually the anomaly. Of course, its not as newsworthy, and climate cycles are often longer than human lifespans so the Rule of Dumb takes precedence. The short version is that Dumb People are everywhere and often put in charge where they can do less damage.

This is also known as the Peter Principle. My last employer was a big fan. Apparently this is now the de facto level of rigor in popular science. It makes me very sad. It should make you sad too.