Exploration Geologist

Everyone’s heard of the proverbial needle in a haystack. Imagine looking for that same needle, however, on the ocean floor, or buried somewhere inside a mountain range. Sound impossible? Not if you’re an Exploration Geologist.

When you’re an Exploration Geologist, it’s your job to find really valuable needles — natural resources such as oil and natural gas — in really big haystacks: oceans, for instance, rivers, deserts, mountains, and other remote locations. A Geologist who’s employed most often by oil and energy companies, you do that by using your intimate knowledge of the earth’s surface to make educated guesses about the probable locations of mineral deposits.

Because the goal of your work is not only finding natural resources — but, ultimately, extracting them — you spend the bulk of your time as an Exploration Geologist doing fieldwork in support of your hypotheses. Here’s how it generally works: Based on geological data, you determine a location you believe holds vast mineral deposits. You then visit that site and physically examine it alongside Cartographers and Surveyors.

While they’re mapping the location, you’re testing it, which requires scrutinizing and scouring rock formations for geological evidence, supervising drilling operations — the purpose of which is collecting samples from the earth’s crust — and then analyzing drill samples to determine what resources are hiding beneath the ground and in what quantities. Based on your findings, you then advise your company about whether to proceed with extraction, and how to do so in the most efficient, cost-effective manner.

You’re a modern-day Christopher Columbus. Instead of a “New World,” however, you’re searching for resources in the old one!