From: stgprao@st.unocal.COM (Richard Ottolini)
Subject: Re: What is Geophysics?
Organization: Unocal Corporation
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 15:26:58 GMT

In article <68046@hydra.gatech.EDU> cc41@prism.gatech.EDU (Craig L. Champlin) writes:
>I will soon be graduating with a BS in Mechanical Engineering from
>Georgia Inst. of Technology.  I am heavily into outdoor persuits and
>have made a point to try and understand the world around me.  From
>what I understand of it, Geophysics sounds like an excellent combination
>of these two interests.  My engineering training, however, has taught
>me to shun pure science and focus my energies on applied problems.  A 
>few hours of scanning journals such as JGR, however, has only revealed
>problems with a definite "pure science" bias.  My question is this:
>
>What sort of applied problems are avaliable in Geophysics and what is 
>the future of this field?  or  Who pays to study this stuff and why?

I went into geophysics for the same reasons but the "dark side of the force"-
computers- keeps me behind the desk most of the time.

Geophysics has been defined as the use of physical fields- sound, light,
magnetics, gravity, electric, heat- to understand planetary bodies and their
environments.  In the US, the definition also includes geologic problems
primarily solved through geophysical techniques- earthquakes, global tectonics,
etc.

There are three main employers in the field- universities, government, and
the resource industries.  A darkhorse is environmental industry, but last
year they only spent one thousandth of what the oil industry spent on geophyscics.
In the the university and government there is still the classic "summer field
season" where geophysicists go out to collect data in scenic areas and on
oceanographic ships.  But my perception is there is less of this in the past.
Much geophysical data is being automatically collected by in place sensors
and satellites.  Also the governement isn't funding the big mapping projects
such as the cruises and COCORP (Consortium for Continental Reflection Profiling)
as much as they used.  The major project this summer was reflection seismic
profiling of Tibet.

The use of geophysicists for resource exploration had plummeted in the past
twelve years.  The number of seismic crews has fallen by 90% from the 1980
high, partly because they have become more efficient and can collect 5-10 times
more data per manhour than in 1980.  There has been no fulltime crew
employed for minerals exploration in the US in the past decade.
The exploration industry has pretty much "outsourced", that is hires acquisition
and data processing expertise from specialist third party companies such
as Western-Atlas, Halliburton, and Schlumberger-GEOC0.  So if you want to
get out into the field, you should join those companies.

The academic side of geophysics is as challanging as ever.  Some long standing
problems such as earthquake prediction seem resistant to progress.
Also there are new arrays of geophysical sensors being implanted in the
earth, put into earth orbit, and sent throughout the solar system that promise
much interesting data for the decades to come.
Newsgroups: sci.geo.geology