Leaning towards a career in Geosciences? As demonstrated by our friends from Aachen University while

Leaning towards a career in Geosciences? As demonstrated by our friends from Aachen University while studying calcite veins on a rock surface in Oman, the study of geology often causes us to apply ourselves in unexpected directions. There are so many geoscience specialties in fields as far apart as the meteors of the outer solar system to the muddy muck on your field boots that hasn’t yet become a rock. The classical fields include the study of rocks (petrology), sediments (sedimentology), how the earth is built (structural geology) and of course, fossils (paleontology). If you want to specialize in itsy bitsy fossils, there’s a field just for you (micropaleontology). There are even more specialties when you count the overlap between fields: Geology + Chemistry = Geochemist; Climatology + Ice Ages = Pleistocene geologist; Are you a geologist with time on your hands? Aha, Geochronology is for you! Employers can be found in industry, both energy and mineral resources, in environmental firms, non-profit organizations, education and, last but not least, the government. There are geologists employed by the National Park Service, and several geologists have even become astronauts. Let’s consider the pay. Off-putting to say the least. Though Geology.com claims starting salaries of $50,000 - $100,000 a year, most of us scattered around the globe scoff at this pay scale. (Yeah, right, tell that to my boss…). And job security, in particular when working in the minerals or oil industry, is not always the best. If the world market price of mineral “X” goes down, somehow firing the geologists is supposed to fix this… But there’s a large difference between pay and reward. And the rewards are, for those of us in love with the Earth, wondrous. You will spend time in the field, whether that field be in some miraculous mountain range, some horrid blazing desert, or even some tens of meters deep in the seas. Alas, as the decades roll by, it seems less time is devoted to what we really love, which is field geology. Geoscience today prefers to fund a short, focused period of research in the field, and decades of follow-up work in the lab or library. The decades of geologists before me spent their lives in the field; I spent decades of my life doing field work (and have the “geologist” knees to prove it the present generation is lucky to be blessed with a month or so a year. Back to the photo – we see Simon, Alex, and Sebastian hard at study of this rock surface, so much so that they seem gravitationally confused. Okay, guys – which way was stratigraphic “up”? Annie R Photo by permission of Max Arndt from http://www.ged.rwth-aachen.de/ Further information:http://geology.com/jobs.htmhttp://tinyurl.com/npf2xvc -- source link

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