You are?!  Great!  Please contact me with your name and thoughts about your academic and professional future.  If you would like, follow these two links to find out more about professional opportunities in the field:

    You may also want to follow this link to find out about Shasta College's Geoscience program.

 

El Nino is an oceanographic phenomenon related to meteorological changes in the Trade Winds.  As it develops, global weather patterns change as drought grips once fertile crop land  and floods rage through deserts, impacting human lives and the global economy.  Your job as a geoscientist is to set into place ocean/atmosphere monitoring stations that will chart the changes associated with the next El Nino in an effort to forecast weather changes and warn the world of the next occurrence.  Click on the image to link to a site that describes physical geoscience.  You may also find yourself searching through rock layers in an effort to recognize the signature of past El Nino events.   Your effort might be to determine how long ago these events started, can they be related to natural or human-caused conditions, and how frequent and intense they have been through time.  This latter endeavor is an example of historical geoscience.


 
 

Tracking through the desert southwest of the United States, you investigate rock layers exposed in the walls of a canyon and over a broader area.   You collect fossils, observe strata one layer on top of another, and faults and fractures that disrupt the rock layers.  As you map these relationships, you are able to project those relationships into the subsurface, creating a "picture", or geologic cross section.  Your studies reveal that the rocks below your feet record an ancient marine basin once teaming with life, now folded and faulted into a suspected petroleum trap.  Click on the image to investigate a site that describes Earth History. Now that a suspected petroleum trap has been identified, the area must be drilled with the well diggings carefully monitored as they are brought to the surface.  As the rock comes up from the well hole, the site geoscientist can determine if the project is on target, potentially saving his company millions of dollars.  This latter aspect is an example of applied geoscience.