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What type of earth science is most common?
I want to know this because I want to study the earth more but I don't know what to do.Also I want to know what earth study is paid the most.#geology #earth-science
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Keith’s Answer
Issac:
Career-wise, petroleum geoscience employs the most geoscientists. Having said that, there are a large number of specialty areas in geosciences. Some cross over into geophysics and geochemistry. So you have your homework cut out for you. You need to determine what specialty area you like the most and feel you could do every day.
I hate to burst your bubble, but in order to get a good job, that is a job that is not really just a grunt, you will need a Masters Degree. That means you will need to take mathmatics up to and including algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. You will also need to take physics and chemistry. So if your idea was to avoid those harder sciences, you cannot.
Now, if you like rocks and minerals, more bad news. There are really very few jobs that pay to study hard rocks and minerals. Sedimentary rocks, yes, there are. Petroleum employs a lot of specialists in sedimentary petrology (petrology is from the latin word petra for rock and has nothing to do with petroleum, which is latin for "rock oil"- petra- rock and oleum- oil. Sedimentary petrologists study sandstones, shales and carbonate rocks since they are the rock types in which petroleum is most often found.
Mining geology is a very small community with fewer employment opportuntites.
Vertibrate and invertebrate paleontology are the study of fossils. The first includes dinosaurs, but somebody has to die for you to get a job in that area and you will need a Phd, as most work for museums or teach. No company pays anyone to study dinosaurs. The second one, is the study of back-bone-less animals and the oil industry does pay a lot of people to study those as they are used for markers of stratigraphic units in which oil is found.
Stratigraphy is the study of the rock layers in the geologic column, it is an important area in which people work in the petroleum industry.
Geophysics is the study of how energy is used to image the rocks deep in the ground it is probably the largest and highest paying area of the geosciences in the petroleum industry.
Petrophysics, is like the above but limited to a well borehole where wells are steered by recording the electrical, radioactive and sonic properties of rocks in order to steer the drill bit to the target. A related field in geo-steering who are specialists who steer the drill bit in real time to hit the sweet spot zone in oil shales for fracking.
Structural geologists are an important segment of specialists that help determine how oil reservoir traps are formed to best understand how to recover the most oil.
Contrary to some who do not know the real world will tell you, there will always be oil. There is not any agreement on whether oil is a finite resource or not. Considering that there are whole planets made up of hydrocarbons in our own solar system and that hydrocarbons appear to be one of them most pentiful types of chemical compounds in the known universe, it is silly to think that it was only formed from organic matter. But that is what our current science tells us. Oil will be around for generations because we do not have anything to replace it. Most oil is used for transportation so yes that can be replaced, but unless we build more nuclear plants oil, natural gas and coal will continue to be used to generate electricity for the foreseeable future.
Look around your home, or classroom. See plastics much? Synthetic clothing? The cover on your notebook, your back pack, you shoes, your pens, your cell phone, your calculator, the rubber on your bike tires or school bus, the carpet on the floor, the styrofoam cups in the lunch room the plastic straws, the plastic water bottles, the pastic chairs, the formica table tops, the tile floors, the plastic seat covers in your car, the vinyl dash of your car, the bumpers the fender trim, the list goes on and on, were all made from oil or natural gas from oil. The plastic wrap and most packaging at the grociery store come from oil. It takes 40 gallons of diesel fuel to plant, fertilize and harvest one acre of farm land. Modern farming in the US and arond the world would be impossible without oil to power the machinery, make fertilizer, and get the grains to market. When I was your age, millions in Africa, Indian and China died of starvation every year before modern agriculture was introduced to those countries by an American named Norman Borlog in the 1950's. He has probably save more peoples lives than Jonas Salk inventor of the polio vaccination.
So my point is oil will always be around, we cannot live without it currently, there is just no replacement for all the products made from it. The only unknown factor is how much it will cost. Long after we cease to use 70% of it for private cars, it will continue to be used for plastics and other materials for which there are no known replacements. I don't think wood or other "renewables" would be much good in making a computer or cell phone.
Want a wooden medical implant? No, I wouldn't either.
So, don't worry, there will aways be a place for a geologist who can find oil and they will continue to look in more and more difficult places. We have not even begun to look on Antarctica. One day we will.
Environmental Geology. Well, been there done that. The pay sucks. Why? Because jobs can be categorized into cost centers and profit centers. If you work in a profit center, like petroleum job, you find oil that MAKES money for your employer. Why do ball players make millions? Because they work in a profit center and they MAKE millions for the team owner. Why do teachers get so little pay? Because they work in a COST Center. That means they cost the local government and the tax payers money. They do not earn money for the state they cost them money. The Environmental scientist is the same. A company pays him to clean things up after a spill or accident creates a problem that is controlled by law. To get legal again they have to perform a cleanup. That COSTS them money, so the want to pay the least amount to get legal or back into "compliance" with the local or federal laws. The might mean cleaning the soil or water back to certain standards decreed by law.
Companies do not know when these accidents or events will occur so they do not hire a lot of environmental people and the ones they do hire do not do the work, they do book keeping and they hire others, the consultants to do the work. So to be competitive, the consultants use a lot of young new hires, overseen and managed by a bunch or more experienced scientists. The consultant industry is like a conveyor belt, governed by your billing rate. As you get older and get more raises and your billing rate gets hire, fewer and fewer project budgets can support your rate and there are fewer and fewer opportunities for you to work.
So, you have to become a manager and work fewer hours on more and more projects and let the younger lower paid folks do the grunt work in the field. So you become more efficient and learn to manage ten or fifteen projects at a time, or carve out a specialty area that is high paid, in order to continue to work. It is higher pressure and time driven since you have to meet a lot of regulatory deadlines. I recall us purchasing a seat on an airplane for a report to make sure that it got from point a to point b without it getting lost. Someone put it in the seat on one end and someone else arrived and picked it up from the seat on the other end. This was pre- 9/11 so I doubt you could do that now, and with Fedex you wouldn't need to with guaranteed delivery. But missing a deadline could cost you millions in regulatory fines or lost government aid.
I had to finish a project in Downtown Dallas in order for the DART transportation system to get tens of millions of Federal money. Some paper Hitler in Austin refused to expedite the processing of my report. I tried to tell her I had friends in high places, but she thought she was Queen of something. So I had to play my ace card, and had the Governor of the State of Texas give her a call and tell her to get off her seat and process my report. Dallas DART got their money because my report was approved the next day.
Career-wise, petroleum geoscience employs the most geoscientists. Having said that, there are a large number of specialty areas in geosciences. Some cross over into geophysics and geochemistry. So you have your homework cut out for you. You need to determine what specialty area you like the most and feel you could do every day.
I hate to burst your bubble, but in order to get a good job, that is a job that is not really just a grunt, you will need a Masters Degree. That means you will need to take mathmatics up to and including algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. You will also need to take physics and chemistry. So if your idea was to avoid those harder sciences, you cannot.
Now, if you like rocks and minerals, more bad news. There are really very few jobs that pay to study hard rocks and minerals. Sedimentary rocks, yes, there are. Petroleum employs a lot of specialists in sedimentary petrology (petrology is from the latin word petra for rock and has nothing to do with petroleum, which is latin for "rock oil"- petra- rock and oleum- oil. Sedimentary petrologists study sandstones, shales and carbonate rocks since they are the rock types in which petroleum is most often found.
Mining geology is a very small community with fewer employment opportuntites.
Vertibrate and invertebrate paleontology are the study of fossils. The first includes dinosaurs, but somebody has to die for you to get a job in that area and you will need a Phd, as most work for museums or teach. No company pays anyone to study dinosaurs. The second one, is the study of back-bone-less animals and the oil industry does pay a lot of people to study those as they are used for markers of stratigraphic units in which oil is found.
Stratigraphy is the study of the rock layers in the geologic column, it is an important area in which people work in the petroleum industry.
Geophysics is the study of how energy is used to image the rocks deep in the ground it is probably the largest and highest paying area of the geosciences in the petroleum industry.
Petrophysics, is like the above but limited to a well borehole where wells are steered by recording the electrical, radioactive and sonic properties of rocks in order to steer the drill bit to the target. A related field in geo-steering who are specialists who steer the drill bit in real time to hit the sweet spot zone in oil shales for fracking.
Structural geologists are an important segment of specialists that help determine how oil reservoir traps are formed to best understand how to recover the most oil.
Contrary to some who do not know the real world will tell you, there will always be oil. There is not any agreement on whether oil is a finite resource or not. Considering that there are whole planets made up of hydrocarbons in our own solar system and that hydrocarbons appear to be one of them most pentiful types of chemical compounds in the known universe, it is silly to think that it was only formed from organic matter. But that is what our current science tells us. Oil will be around for generations because we do not have anything to replace it. Most oil is used for transportation so yes that can be replaced, but unless we build more nuclear plants oil, natural gas and coal will continue to be used to generate electricity for the foreseeable future.
Look around your home, or classroom. See plastics much? Synthetic clothing? The cover on your notebook, your back pack, you shoes, your pens, your cell phone, your calculator, the rubber on your bike tires or school bus, the carpet on the floor, the styrofoam cups in the lunch room the plastic straws, the plastic water bottles, the pastic chairs, the formica table tops, the tile floors, the plastic seat covers in your car, the vinyl dash of your car, the bumpers the fender trim, the list goes on and on, were all made from oil or natural gas from oil. The plastic wrap and most packaging at the grociery store come from oil. It takes 40 gallons of diesel fuel to plant, fertilize and harvest one acre of farm land. Modern farming in the US and arond the world would be impossible without oil to power the machinery, make fertilizer, and get the grains to market. When I was your age, millions in Africa, Indian and China died of starvation every year before modern agriculture was introduced to those countries by an American named Norman Borlog in the 1950's. He has probably save more peoples lives than Jonas Salk inventor of the polio vaccination.
So my point is oil will always be around, we cannot live without it currently, there is just no replacement for all the products made from it. The only unknown factor is how much it will cost. Long after we cease to use 70% of it for private cars, it will continue to be used for plastics and other materials for which there are no known replacements. I don't think wood or other "renewables" would be much good in making a computer or cell phone.
Want a wooden medical implant? No, I wouldn't either.
So, don't worry, there will aways be a place for a geologist who can find oil and they will continue to look in more and more difficult places. We have not even begun to look on Antarctica. One day we will.
Environmental Geology. Well, been there done that. The pay sucks. Why? Because jobs can be categorized into cost centers and profit centers. If you work in a profit center, like petroleum job, you find oil that MAKES money for your employer. Why do ball players make millions? Because they work in a profit center and they MAKE millions for the team owner. Why do teachers get so little pay? Because they work in a COST Center. That means they cost the local government and the tax payers money. They do not earn money for the state they cost them money. The Environmental scientist is the same. A company pays him to clean things up after a spill or accident creates a problem that is controlled by law. To get legal again they have to perform a cleanup. That COSTS them money, so the want to pay the least amount to get legal or back into "compliance" with the local or federal laws. The might mean cleaning the soil or water back to certain standards decreed by law.
Companies do not know when these accidents or events will occur so they do not hire a lot of environmental people and the ones they do hire do not do the work, they do book keeping and they hire others, the consultants to do the work. So to be competitive, the consultants use a lot of young new hires, overseen and managed by a bunch or more experienced scientists. The consultant industry is like a conveyor belt, governed by your billing rate. As you get older and get more raises and your billing rate gets hire, fewer and fewer project budgets can support your rate and there are fewer and fewer opportunities for you to work.
So, you have to become a manager and work fewer hours on more and more projects and let the younger lower paid folks do the grunt work in the field. So you become more efficient and learn to manage ten or fifteen projects at a time, or carve out a specialty area that is high paid, in order to continue to work. It is higher pressure and time driven since you have to meet a lot of regulatory deadlines. I recall us purchasing a seat on an airplane for a report to make sure that it got from point a to point b without it getting lost. Someone put it in the seat on one end and someone else arrived and picked it up from the seat on the other end. This was pre- 9/11 so I doubt you could do that now, and with Fedex you wouldn't need to with guaranteed delivery. But missing a deadline could cost you millions in regulatory fines or lost government aid.
I had to finish a project in Downtown Dallas in order for the DART transportation system to get tens of millions of Federal money. Some paper Hitler in Austin refused to expedite the processing of my report. I tried to tell her I had friends in high places, but she thought she was Queen of something. So I had to play my ace card, and had the Governor of the State of Texas give her a call and tell her to get off her seat and process my report. Dallas DART got their money because my report was approved the next day.
Updated
Vernon’s Answer
First, master the English language. Petroleum geology will pay the most, but it will be replaced, in your lifetime, by alternative energy development. Instead of hydrocarbon energy, other geologically-based energy sources will come from geothermal sources. Attend schools that emphasize your particular field(s) of choice.
Updated
Jeremy’s Answer
The answer is multiple. It’s like asking what’s the most common medical doctor.
Professionally a geologist can go into energy, environmental, investment banking, government, academia.
You may be asking about specialities like structure or stratigraphy among two of many.
If you take an intro to geology class it will help you see what’s most interesting to uou
Professionally a geologist can go into energy, environmental, investment banking, government, academia.
You may be asking about specialities like structure or stratigraphy among two of many.
Jeremy recommends the following next steps: