الخميس، 10 سبتمبر 2015
الثلاثاء، 8 سبتمبر 2015
The Fitness of Geology
"I do not know of any fields in which professionals enjoy their work more than geologists do. Perhaps this is due to the uniqueness of work in the geological sciences. What other science requires the use of both the mind and body?" ——John Wakabayashi
Science is a labor of the mind and will, but some of its specialties call upon the muscles as well. Perhaps the foremost of those is geology. I believe geologists are the fittest of scientists and, aside from one or two specific hazards, the most likely to have long and productive lives.
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Meeting Chair John Wakabayashi talks about the geology along Panoche RoadPhysical Fitness
The geologist's fieldwork is the kind of freeform, nonrepetitive workout that gyms can't offer:
Carrying specimens back to the vehicle combines all of these. And every minute of the day is different.
A day in the field leaves one pleasantly tired and ready for a mild muscle relaxant.
 Mental Fitness
At every step geologists are also using their eyes and minds. Geology seems particularly to call upon multiple intelligences as well as the method of multiple working hypotheses.
Fieldwork is motion with a point—it is constant observation. They say that the best geologist is the one who has seen the most rocks. Seeing rocks is an intense mental workout in four dimensions, three in space and one in time. The minerals, textures, fabric, colors and fossils all must be noted and assessed. The regional setting and neighboring rocks bear on the immediate scene as well.
When rocks are brought back to the laboratory, all the field evidence must be kept in mind there too—and when the field site is revisited, the lab results may change what to look at. Indeed, they may change what is being seen.
The ability to plan complex undertakings and change plans on the fly is an essential geologic skill. Whether it's equipment breakdowns, injury or illness in the team, bad weather, the threat of wild animals, or salvaging a failed expedition, mental fitness is what prevails. The exemplar in this respect is one-armed geologist John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition down the Grand Canyon in 1869 without a map and emerged a hero.
Mental exercise is known to help prevent or forestall dementias related to age, such as Alzheimer's disease. Playing chess works, but the geologist's open-ended kind of mental exercise is better suited to our native brain. Geologists who teach or give presentations—that is, most of them—get the same stimulation year round. And in a field that many can excel in, but none can master, the challenge of geology never fades.
  Social Fitness
The day is long gone when geology was a solo occupation. Well-run teams do better science than individuals. The best geologist must not only see the most rocks, but must work well with the most people. The best geologist is effective in email as well as in the field: a glance at the authorship of journal articles shows that collaborators may be anywhere in the world.
A geologist may deal with suspicious landowners to gain access to their property, not to mention strangers in the woods and petty officials in foreign countries. All of these possibilities call for good social skills. And after every interaction, geologists have another story to tell each other.
 Hazards of the Field
Physical, mental and social fitness go far in the field, but some special hazards wait there too. Bears and wolves and other large animals make firearms a necessity in many areas. Falls, cuts and sprains require skill with first aid. There are hazardous plants to watch out for, too. Although technology makes hunger, thirst and getting lost less likely than in the old days, a passing familiarity with wilderness survival is good to have.
Then there's the sun. Long hours in the sun, especially at high altitude, make skin cancer an occupational hazard for geologists.
Finally, it's essential to be a good driver, and it's helpful to be handy with tools. Every geologist has at least one story about a car, a boat or a plane
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Fossils in rocks
Fossils in rocks are preserved which are studied by the scientists. The fossils are the key to past, by studying fossils provide us the evidence for what happened in the Earth history and when it happened. Fossils can tell us series of things like
- Correlating same age rock units.
- The time a rock layered deposited.
- What were the conditions at time of deposition.
- What were the environment in which the rock was formed.
- What happened in the Earth's history.
Regardless of the greater part of the enthusiasm for dinosaurs, they frame just a little portion of the a large number of animal groups that live and have lived on Earth. The colossal greater part of the fossil record is commanded by fossils of creatures with shells and minute stays of plants and creatures, and these remaining parts are broad in sedimentary rocks. It is these fossils that are examined by most scientists.
In the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth hundreds of years, the English geologist and designer William Smith and the French scientists Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart found that stones of the same age may contain the same fossils notwithstanding when the stones are isolated by long separations. They distributed the first geologic maps of vast zones on which shakes containing comparative fossils were indicated. Via cautious perception of the stones and their fossils, these men and different geologists had the capacity perceive rocks of the same age on inverse sides of the English Channel.
William Smith had the capacity apply his insight into fossils in an exceptionally down to earth way. He was a designer building channels in England, which has loads of vegetation and few surface exposures of rock. He expected to comprehend what rocks he could hope to discover on the slopes through which he needed to fabricate a channel. Frequently he could tell what sort of rock was prone to be underneath the surface by inspecting the fossils that had disintegrated from the stones of the slope or by burrowing a little opening to discover fossils. Realizing what rocks to anticipate that permitted Smith will gauge costs and figure out what devices were required for the employment.
Smith and others realized that the progression of life structures saved as fossils is valuable for seeing how and when the stones shaped. Just later did researchers build up a hypothesis to clarify that progression.
This clearly shows how the rocks can be correlated and what time deposited by examining the fossils of the age at which it were deposited. The age of the fossil is regarded as the age of the rock unit in which it is found. Moreover by looking at the fossils of marine and land animals clearly shows the deposition of rock unit under conditions of terrestial and marine.
