by H.S. Lahman
I spent a winter doing geophysical surveys in the Northwest Territories in Canada. (If you have ever seen the show Ice Road Truckers on the History Channel, I drove that road several times that winter.) We were living in plywood shacks with an average temperature of...
by H.S. Lahman
If there is anyone loonier than geologists, it has to be the people that live permanently in the North Country. They are hardy beyond belief. They can fix anything under ridiculous conditions, and they always seem to have the tools they need handy. I knew one guy...
by H.S. Lahman
As a party chief, I had management problems that the B-School never dreamed of. In the Northwest Territories I hired roustabout labor by going down to the RCMP post and bailing guys out of jail. That’s because the roustabouts were drunk twenty minutes after hitting...
by H.S. Lahman
When you walk around in the bushes a lot, you tend to encounter wildlife. Mostly it is deer, moose, porcupines, and skunks. I’ve run into black bears a few times, but they were invariably running away. I’ve only had three encounters with wildlife that were potentially...
by H.S. Lahman
Running electrical surveying has its risks. One type of survey we did was deep crustal measurements for the Navy because they needed to find good places for the antennas they used for talking to Polaris submarines. This involved laying out wire dipoles 1-2 miles long,...
by H.S. Lahman
When traveling the world as a geologist, you tend to encounter a lot of interesting world views. I went into a small general store in the Texas Panhandle and asked the woman at the register where something was. She replied, “Go two aisles South and one East.” I...
by H.S. Lahman
If you like the outdoors, you have limited choices for occupations that pay more than minimum wage; various flavors of agriculture, field biology/botany, and geology are pretty much it. In geology, that’s fine until you get married and have a couple of kids. Then your...
by H.S. Lahman
In 1951 my father found himself as economic attaché at the US Embassy in New Delhi, India. He was faced with the problem of getting me into a school. Most of the diplomatic corps’ kids went to a Protestant missionary school. My father was a convert to Catholicism and...
by H.S. Lahman
Updated 9/21/17: clarified lack of water on Venus and time line The Venus Myth One sees citations in the Green popular literature about Venus being a runaway greenhouse effect. There are two implications in this to scare us about global warming. One is that Venus once...
