You Can Be Anything › All careers › Science & Research
Geologist
Studies Earth's structure, rocks, minerals, and natural processes like earthquakes and volcanoes.
Did you know?
Geologists discovered that Earth's inner core is as hot as the surface of the Sun (~5,500°C)
How subjects help
- Geology: Read layers of rock in a cliff to work out how a landscape formed over millions of years.
- Chemistry: Test the minerals in a rock sample to find metals or tell how the rock was formed.
- Physics: Send sound waves into the ground and use the echoes to map hidden rock layers far below.
- Mathematics: Calculate how fast rock layers built up to estimate the age of a canyon or fossil bed.
A famous name
Charles Lyell: His Principles of Geology (1830-33) showed Earth was shaped slowly by everyday natural forces.
Try it yourself: Scratch-test your pebbles
- Wash and dry your pebbles, then number them on a piece of paper.
- Put one pebble on a table, hold it still and press your fingernail into it with a short digging stroke. Wipe the spot with your thumb: if a groove stays, your nail scratched it.
- If your nail left no mark, try the edge of the coin in the same way. Write down for each pebble: "nail scratches", "coin scratches" or "neither".
- Now line your pebbles up from softest to hardest. A fingernail is about 2 on the hardness scale and a copper coin about 3, so anything neither could scratch is harder than 3.
Geologists in the field use the same scratch test, with a fingernail, a coin and steel tools, as a quick first clue to which mineral a rock is made of, before sending samples to a lab.
Adapted from Maine Geological Survey: Activity 20: Testing the Hardness of Common Minerals.
Also try: Build dig layers in a tub.
Known for it in
USA, Australia, Canada, Norway, UK