Army Life

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I have the distinction of being the first person ever drafted out of MIT’s graduate school. I spent my two fun-filled years at Paradise in the Pines — Ft. Bragg, NC, home to the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, the 82nd Airborne Division, and Special Forces. Back then...

Touring the World as a Geophysicist

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After the Army, I was out of money and decided to try working for a living. I was hired by Geoscience, an MIT spinoff that specialized in electrical measurements. Geologists and geophysicists are crazy. For example,… Only geologists regard a rainy day as good...

Geology in Venzuela

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I was on a job evaluating an old gold mining district in Venezuela, El Callao. The district was up a tributary of the Orinoco River in head hunter country. (The head hunters were not much of a problem, though, after a century of state-sponsored genocide.) The mines...

Geophysics in the Outback

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We had a field crew running in the Australian Outback. The party chief was the legendary “Black Jack” Benlow, named for his preferred tool for calming down recalcitrant crew members. Jack had a strong sense for the proper way to do things. At 3 PM the crew would break...

Geophysics Up North

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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...

North Country Hardiness

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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...

Geology Management Problems

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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...

Geology & Critters

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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...

Scary Geophysics

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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,...

Geological world views

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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...