I’m aware that there are several geologists who participate at Daily Kos.
It got me thinking about writing this piece to try to learn who else participating here might be willing to admit to being a geologist, perhaps to serve as a resource when geology-related topics or events catch the attention of the general population of Kossacks. Sadly, there’s a lot of misleading information about geology among some folks who participate in this website. One example briefly made the top of the “Trending” list yesterday.
I’ll start: I’ve been a geologist since I left undergraduate school with a geology Bachelor’s degree in 1980. I went on to a research fellowship involving alpine snow and ice sampling, soil tensiometers, thermal well sampling, and alpine fluvial processes. At the same time I started graduate school, where I quickly suffered whiplash because school 1 was all about geosynclines and miogeosynclines whereas school 2 was heavily invested in plate tectonics.
I successfully tested to get the first of several professional registrations from one of the states that register the geologic profession a few years later. Registrations have come and gone as work demands change over time, but I’ve held one particular professional geologist registration continuously for a total of 37 years so far. Over my career, I’ve had the good fortune to work on projects located on five continents.
While I was in undergraduate school it became pretty evident that the school, with its heavy emphasis on structural geology, invertebrate paleontology, petrology, mineralogy, and crystallography, more or less was a pipeline feeding freshly-minted geologists into the petroleum industry.
I didn’t want that.
I didn’t want to work in that industry and I didn’t want to live in the South, where so many geologists got jobs in Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and points beyond. Sure, some of my classmates ended up in Colorado, California, or Alaska, but most headed south.
I had the good fortune to take one, and then another hydrogeology class during my senior year in undergraduate school. This was a pretty new field at the time, but it really fit my background. It had physics. It had geology. It had chemistry. It had math and statistics. It had complex regulations and the arcane nooks and crannies of water law. Later, diverse fields such as microbiology and elements of chemical engineering became increasingly important.
In short, it was perfect for a person who knows something about a lot of different things. So I took the dive, got a hydrogeology Master’s and… and… immediately became unemployed.
Turns out I had the poor luck to get out of graduate school in the depths of what I called the “Reagan Recession.”
Reagan, for those who weren’t born at the time, was like Trump in that he appointed people to head departments and agencies specifically because they were openly hostile to their missions. There was James Watt at Interior, who was so ideological and petty that he literally had the buffalo on the Interior Department’s logo flipped to be facing right rather than left (I kid you not). And don’t get me started on the dynamic duo of Anne Gorsuch Burford at EPA (Contempt of Congress) and her criminal associate Rita Lavelle (convicted of Perjury, Wire Fraud, and lying to the FBI), head of what then was the new Superfund program.
In time, they failed as pretty much all criminals do, and investment in environmental cleanup and new statutory and regulatory requirements began flowing out of Congress, EPA, and its sister agencies in the states. Work became very busy and stayed so until I went into semi-retirement a few years ago (still working, though, now on my terms).
I was lucky. Many geologic fields are more boom and bust. Petroleum geology is, in particular. But so is economic (mining) geology. To a lesser degree, hydrogeology is as well, but because it is driven more by laws and regulations rather than as much by economic ups and downs, it has tended to be a bit more stable than other geologic specialties.
I think geologists, because of their understanding of the Earth’s history and how much the Earth — its geology, its continents, its topography, its life forms, and its climate — has changed over time, may take a different view of various phenomena than those who lack such understanding or who have only a superficial knowledge of them. Most especially, the very long span of time geologists understand better than most people tends to give geologists a somewhat different perspective on the goings on of the Earth and its various dynamic systems.
So, if you’re a geologist, I’d encourage you to chime in with a comment. What’s your story? What’s your specialty? Great geology-related anecdotes are always welcome.
If you’re a student contemplating geology as a field of study, do you have any questions with which a practicing geologist might be able to help you?