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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 0001
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As a geologist who works in the Appalachians... They're cool af.
Nothing is more surreal than being a geologist. Just today I was standing on a dirt road in the middle of farmers field. Looking at the ground is an innocuous little outcrop of boring looking rocks. But those rocks erupted at the bottom of a back arc basin off the coast of Laurentia, was buried by ocean sediment for ages, had an entire ISLAND of rock thrust onto it, and then buried 10s of kilometers deep. The history one rock can tell is amazing.
You must be fun at parties
No, like for real. People getting excited about what they do is the best.
As a non-geologist living next to Lake Diefenbaker (the reservoir formed by damming the South Saskatchewan River), I also like geological history.
I have a standard reply for when I'm asked why we chose to move to this "treeless wasteland". "I look out at the flat horizon and see how the glaciers planed the earth the way a woodworker flattens a board. I look around me at the river breaks and see how the meltwater from retreating glaciers carved the earth away into shapes that defy imagination." I don't know accurate any of that is, but it fits my mental model of what I was taught in high school.
(What we call the river breaks are twisted and braided networks of coulees, some with sides so steep as to require mountaineering equipment. Most still run with meltwater in the spring.)
I have started daydreaming of a career change to geology. There are just so many unanswered questions and its not like space or physics were these questions are tinyor super far away. You can just walk upto a geologic puzzle and hit it with a hammer.
"this rock tastes like.... History."
Ever heard of Geophysics? :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geophysics
Not sure if my username gave it away or not, but I’m really into applied mathematics. I’m a physics major right now, & while I don’t immediately see myself studying this in grad school, I think that the physics of Volcanism/Plate Tectonics is extremely fascinating. It certainly looks at the history of the world through a very different lens, but I wouldn’t write it off completely!! The physics of our Earth is a beautiful, beautiful thing. :)
Yeah! Geomag, tomography, and dating are all really important tools, and magma dynamics is a whole encyclopedia waiting to be written. So cool!
Terry Pratchett
https://www.motionmountain.net/motionmountain-volume5.pdf
Unfortunately geology jobs that aren't working for the oil and gas industries are few and far between.
That is not exactly true. My dad was a geology professor. About half his students ended up in oil and gas. The other half were employed as city planners, teachers, consulting geologists, and in , civil engineering firms, environmental services firms, mining and others.
Hey! There's other resources to extract!
But yeah, thats a big pressure away form it and a reason its still daydreams