IMMERSIVE INTEGRATION OF GEOSCIENCE ON THE WAY TO THE NEW WAY OF WORK (Invited Presentation)

The 21^st Century has become a very uncertain place. Whether the global economy hurdles towards a National Walls model or move towards a free trade economy or an environmental-focused economy will impact how the geosciences will thrive and what its priorities must be to remain relevant to society. But overarching changes in the nature of work in the economy will also impact the geosciences, encompassing the skills needed by geoscientists and our community’s ability to evolve its view of its role in greater society and economy. We are used to the U.S. BEA defined economic sectors, yet most definitions were set prior to WWII and for many reasons, are very hard to reframe. That led to emerging fields like geoscience to be scattered across many sectors. Now we see massive shifts of what constitutes a corporate’s economic sector – is Tesla an automotive manufacturer, is Shell with its mass investments in EV charging in Europe still an Oil and Gas Company?

These trends also change the nature of work of geoscientists. The minerals sector has led the way with adoption of machine learning to change how geoscience is done. Not necessarily to replace geoscientists, but to augment them to multiply productivity. Yes, displacement will occur as traditional fields and disciplinary areas fade away – stratigraphic and seismic interpretation, core logging, well logging, geomorphologists, and hydrologist are just some of our traditional definitions likely to fade away as occupations. Geoscience has been a collaborative, multidisciplinary field for a full generation and we are seeing the logical evolution to where the person is the nexus of multidisciplinary problem solving. In addition, the role of workers change from automation – those that must solve the problems automation can’t and those that will discover new data metrics and engineering ways to collect and synthesize data to accelerate the problem solving process. These are two distinct creative, intellectually challenging paths forward for geoscience, but standing alone as a distinct discipline in a merging economy will not be an option.