fun stuff to drill through (4)

This post a while back on water handling reminded me of another geologic feature that's a pain to drill through: faults. (see my last post on this topic and some links to older posts here).

Now, I haven't overseen drilling into any spectacular or famous faults, per se. But I have very rarely drilled into faults of at least local significance - local enough to be mapped and named, anyway.

Drilling into faults or fault zones at any depth of significance (say, more than 50 feet or so) leads to two major issues: water production and borehole instability.

Larger scale faults tend to be more than just a single fracture in the bedrock. They may include a fault zone, where the rock for a certain distance is much more fractured and may possibly have a different structure than the parent rock. This may hold a lot of water. And if you're flying along, doing some sort of fast, aggressive drilling such as air-rotary, and creating a borehole with a reasonably wide diameter, you may end up tapping into a lot more water than expected. And depending on the air pressure the driller's using, the drilling rate, and the structure of the rock, the water flow may not just stop once the driller turns off the air pressure. Nothing like watching your frac tanks fill up with contaminated water while you wait for the water to stop pouring out of the borehole!

So, water production is a thing that you can deal with. You get the frac tanks on-line, make sure that you have pumps capable of moving a lot of water, and maybe stop drilling for a bit every once in a while to see how much water you're getting back. Borehole instability is another problem.

Once we install a borehole, we usually like to do a bunch of testing, which involves lowering instruments down there to collect samples and geophysical measurements, installing packers to seal off certain zones for testing, and maybe putting in a permanent system with multiple sample ports. If you have a fracture zone that's at a reasonably steep angle, and bedrock that is not super hard (like a siltstone or sandstone) you may find that the walls of the borehole pinch back in almost immediately. This makes it hard to fish the drill rods out of the borehole, let alone any $10,000 geophysical tooling you'd like to use. You can always try and bang in some steel casing past the obstruction, but at that point you may have shrunk the effective size of the borehole so you can't get the other stuff you need down there, and then you've shut off the rest of the bedrock from evaluation. And multiple boreholes get expensive fast. Another option is to be a lot more cautious up front, and do all your sampling/testing in 10-foot intervals as you drill (with casing above the interval in question), but that does slow the drilling process down and requires much more coordination between multiple contractors, all of whom are being paid for their standby time.

Intercepting a fault/fault zone actually can tell us quite a bit about the regional geology and the structure of the bedrock. We just have to be able to get a borehole in there long enough to do the evaluation.

local hand specimen

I'm not approached to identify rocks very often. Most of the time I'm working in the field, I'm not in a location that's visible to the public, and when I am, I'm usually not doing something that obviously involves rocks. That's fine because rocks aren't actually my thing.

A while back, a maintenance guy working on one of my sites noticed that my business card had a variant of the word "geologist" on it. He mentioned that he lived in an old house, and that while they were renovating it, he found a funny rock tucked behind a wall. Could he bring it in for identification?

I expected him to bring in a piece of slag (often confused for rock around here, and in some places, much easier to find than bedrock), or maybe a rock with some reasonably large chunks of mica.

What he actually brought me was a fist-sized, perfectly formed crystal that I could have used as a type example for a mineralogy class. It also happened to be rare enough that I could give him a short list of local mines that it most likely came from. I'm not going to show the actual mineral here because it was so locally specific, but picture something like this (from here):

(Franklinite, pictured above, is a tad more rare than the mineral I identified, but you get the point)

So I got to tell him that his "funny rock" was actually a historically and geologically valuable specimen, and that with a bit more research (mine years of operation vs. house renovation/build years), he may be able to ferret out a very small list of places it actually came from. He could sell it for a reasonably high price, but I hope he holds onto it - it would make a great family/house heirloom.

competitor advice

I gave a driller a ride to another site that his company was working at so he could borrow a particular tool. When we arrived, I introduced myself to the geologist, who worked for a firm that directly competes with mine, and we started chatting as the drillers rummaged around their rig. He seemed to be a complete newbie and unsure of himself, a position that I remember well and empathize with.

He needed to install a monitoring well at the top of rock or at a target depth, whichever was first, and he was trying to figure out if he'd hit bedrock yet. So where had I hit bedrock?

Well, I was on top of a bare bedrock knob, so we'd simply stuck the drill rig where it was supposed to go and started bedrock drilling. He was in a valley several miles away, and I didn't have the foggiest idea of the  bedrock depth at his location.

He was pretty disappointed at this. But then he had another idea. What did my bedrock look like?

"Well, bedrock can be pretty variable in this area [it's composed of a bunch of different units smushed together]. But we encountered X rock, composed of mostly mineral A and some mineral B, and in a few places, this really distinct mineral C..." then I realized his eyes had glazed over.

He picked up a nondescript chunk of rock that did not look like what I had encountered. "So, did it look like this? Could this be bedrock? We drilled in about 3 inches."

In case you were wondering, we were working in boulder central. Three inches of rock drilling tells you nothing about where the parent rock actually is. At this point, I realized I was perilously close to suggesting that he take some action (drill deeper) that would have an impact on his firm's investigation, so I hemmed and hawed and suggested he follow whatever his home office/specification/work plan suggested. Luckily, my driller came back with what he needed and we skeddadled.

My instinct is to be as helpful as possible, but I also don't want to annoy either my organization or a competitor by inserting myself in someone else's work. What would you have done?

trespassing

Geologists, do you trespass? Do you chase your outcrop over hill and dale? Sneak over a fence to collect a nice rock specimen?

I do not. I'm pretty careful about lining up my permissions and access agreements. Even when a resident tells me straight out to just let myself in and not bother them with notifications, I still send a reminder before I go, and once I'm done with my sampling, leave a business card with a note thanking them. Part of this is personality - I wouldn't want some service person to just go waltzing onto my property.

But part of my care is because I've been burned before. For example, I put in a monitoring well (a bedrock well, with a nice steel casing keyed and cemented into bedrock) and find out only afterward that the property line isn't exactly where we thought it was. Or the time that, due to an unfortunate game of telephone, "I'll give permission once I visit and you show me the intended well location" became "I give you permission" and the property owner was mighty surprised to find a drill rig already in operation for their visit.

When I was an undergrad, it seemed like a lot of our field trips were awfully casual about property access. We had mapping to do, and we had no compunction about crossing property lines. Granted, going outcrop hunting doesn't have quite the same impact as poking holes in the ground with heavy equipment. But even if I'm just measuring strike and dip and I'm not actually taking anything except for information, I still get that permission. That measurement will go on a map in a report, and once it's there, it's a permanent record of where I've been. Saves awkward questions later. And also, it's simple to chat about the significance of that big wall of rock in the backyard with the homeowner and it may save you the indignity of getting physically chased out.

volcanoes and space photos

The Big Picture has two recent sets of photos of geological interest: volcanic activity and images of the earth and space from NASA. You should check out both sets - the volcano pictures, especially, are terrific.

Here's a sampling:

A June 27 lava flow from Kilauea volcano in Pahoa, Hawaii (provided by USGS):

A September 10 solar flare captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:

it keeps going

Sometimes people have a preconception about what the soil profile is. In my part of the world, you generally have turf/roots above a sandy soil. At some unspecified distance which is likely less than 20 feet, you'll run into rock and that's the end of the soil profile. This is true for lots of areas in my region, but not all. I occasionally run into a situation where a layperson continues to go deeper and deeper, looking for that elusive turf-sandy soil-rock mixture that they have in their head. And it doesn't work out well.

Like my dad. His front yard has a sad, thin layer of soil above boulders. He is convinced that the best way to get dirt (and therefore have enough soil that his sad, thin layer of grass will thrive) is to simply excavate the boulders. If you don't have rocks, then therefore, you must have soil, right? So when it's warm and he's feeling like he wants to take on A Project, he rips out the rocks he finds buried right below the grass. The big ones he has to roll down the hill next to the house, into the back yard, and down a slope to the woods below. The picture below is a cross-section of the house and the street. Take a look and guess what his problem is:

That yard? All fill, front and back. So he can pick out all the boulders he wants, and all he does is lower the yard some more. If he wants to have sandy soil, he'll have to import it.

Another example: I once had a contractor help drag a drill rig into a big mud bog with an excavator. The contractor had cleared a path for the drill rig, but by the time the rig and support truck was in place, we had a giant muddy mess. The contractor had said he would "clean things up" and I got distracted by other things. Well, what he did was try and remove all that sticky, wet mud we'd made. Unfortunately, there was nothing below the muck except more muck, and he'd excavated about 3 feet closer to the water table. From there, we had no chance of letting things "dry out" because everything was saturated, and you couldn't exactly schmear the mud back to let it dry because the acts of driving through and then scooping it up had utterly destroyed any structure that could have held it up, and frankly, I didn't want the contractor making it worse by increasing the area of unstable muck. See the sidebar picture for the sort of conditions we were dealing with.

As a geologist, I have a pretty good understanding of all the interesting stuff that can be right underfoot. That knowledge can come in handy when you least expect it.

fun stuff to drill through (3)

This is another entry in the intermittent series I started in October (previous installments are here and here) regarding material that is a giant pain to drill through.

Another material that causes headaches is bedrock which changes drastically and unpredictably over small scales. Examples include small-scale fault zones, which may include significant fractures and breccia zones above or next to relatively massive rock. Or severely mashed-up rocks that have very different properties, such as gneiss on top of pegmatite or coal-bearing seams in mixed shale and sandstone.

Rock coring requires a steady flow of water to cool the drill bit and remove crud that would otherwise jam the core barrel. So drillers bring along drill bits that they think will work the best for what they'll encounter. If they are expecting soft rock and run into a hard layer for a few feet (such as a particularly quartz-rich sandstone), they'll wear down the bit in no time. If they are expecting shale and run into a coal seam, all that soft material will gum up the works and they'll have to keep stopping to pull everything up, clean out the core barrel, and try again. If they're expecting competent (non-fractured) granite and they end up drilling through some zones with loose grains, those sandy bits will cause the core barrel to lock up and then they get to pull up and try again.

I'm not an expert on which drill bits to use for what - CME has a whole catalog that discusses what to select, and individual drillers will have their preferences based on local knowledge. But I have spent hours and hours watching ineffective coring because the units are changing too fast to change out bits or the driller only brought one type in the first place. And it says something that rock coring bits are the most common items in my collection.

short courses

I was asked about review courses here and figured the topic needed more than just a short answer. Many organizations have workshops on environmental or geological topics that are low-cost or free, partially to fulfill an educational mission, and partially to support professionals who have continuing  education requirements. I suggested looking up your local professional organization, but here are some links to other options, some of which I've mentioned before:

1. Clu-in.org has a bunch of free webinars focused on environmental topics. I prefer live webinars, but they also have archived presentations as well.

2. Trainex.org is a separate site with links on clu-in. It includes a number of classroom courses in addition to videos and online courses. It's intended for EPA and other government personnel, but non-government folks can generally take the courses if they pay the course fee. The course fees are generally lower than the next option...

3. The national ground water association has events listed here, which include brownbags, webinars, and short courses. Some of their more interesting webinars are member-only.

4. Conferences are generally a good option, but unless you have a generous expense account, their usefulness depends on where they're held and how expensive they are. Some organizations to keep in mind for geology/environmental consulting stuff (in the US):
     a. NGWA lists their conferences plus a lot of water supply stuff here
     b. Geological Society of America has section meetings, a big annual meeting, and subject-specific conferences
     c. the Association for Environmental Health and Sciences has meetings on the east and west coast
     d. the National Association for Environmental Professionals has one annual meeting coming up
     e. Battelle has a set of three conferences.
     f. RemTEC is every 2 years - next one in 2015.
     g. The National Environmental Monitoring Symposium

So there are a bunch of options out there for continuing ed credits or just expanding your knowledge...

volcano photos

Sorry this week is light on content... all of my ambition has been frozen with this weather. Anyway, The Big Picture last week had some lovely photos on erupting volcanoes, such as this one:

The forecast is looking more positive (above freezing, even) in my area this week, so maybe the lava fields won't look so tempting then.

plants and rocks

I missed December's Accretionary Wedge about plants and rocks - I really need to keep up on my geoblogosphere reading! I am not a botanist, and my knowledge of plants is generally restricted to the local ones which can cause me trouble, such as poison oak and poison ivy. I do have one piece of botanical/geological advice:

If you are trying to locate pockets of soil deep enough to get a good non-surface soil sample, and you are ass-deep in boulders and cobbles and outcroppings, you are often limited in the areas you can get your drill rig. It is tempting to try and drill in the center of an area that is relatively free of trees. However, there's probably a reason the trees aren't at that area. Far better to maneuver to one such clearing, and then aim the drill rods right at the edge, close to the trees. You're much likely to get something other than a rock ledge with 4 inches of dirt on top.

fun stuff to drill through (2)

Karst is my least-favorite material to drill through, because you never know what you may find. You can drill through hundreds of feet of essentially solid rock, then move over 20 feet and drill into a cavern. I was at one site where a drill rig set up about 100 feet from a major highway, began drilling, got down about 2 feet, and then the drill rods dropped the full length of the rods (20 feet). They scrambled off that location and ended up dumping a truck's worth of gravel in the hole to stabilize it and fill the boring.

Another problem is the necessity of drilling beyond a big void without letting that giant pool of (possibly) contaminated water flow downward to mess up (possibly) clean material below. In that scenario, we usually telescope casing. That is, start drilling with a larger diameter bit, say 10- or 12-inch. Drill down to the big void and set casing through it and seated into the rock below. Make sure you are well seated (at least a couple feet) so that you can pump cement down there. You'll likely need a special plug so that you can pump cement down the inside of the casing and force it out to the outside. Once everything is sealed, re-start drilling and repeat the process with the drill bit that's a size smaller. Repeat process for each big void and hope you don't need to telescope too often to get where you need to go. If you guess wrong and don't start with a large enough borehole in the first place, you'll need to drill another, wider hole and start the process all over again.

Water control is another big problem. The fastest and cheapest way to drill through relatively hard material like limestone is to use air-rotary drilling, where you blast compressed air down the borehole while a drill bit chews away at the rock. Air, rock chips, and water get sprayed back out the top of the borehole, where it is contained by a big contraption that allows everything to fall out and not cause a complete mess. The material collects in a mud tub, which is regularly shoveled (solids) and pumped (water) to drums or holding tanks. However, if you hit a big water-filled void of contaminated water, you can get 200 gpm or more that you need to be able to contain and pump, and somewhere to pump it to. So  air-rotary drilling may not be the best application. An alternative is cable-tool drilling, where a heavy bit free-falls and then the little broken-up rock pieces are bailed out of the borehole. Cable-tool drilling is painfully slow, and hardly anyone does it anymore in the areas I work in, so the pool of (antique) drill rigs available and drillers familiar with them is small.

I always err on the side of caution when I'm in an area known to have big voids. But if everything goes well and we don't hit much of anything, then I get an earful about why we spent so much time and money on giant boreholes or slow drilling methods. And why, exactly, we have a bunch of 20,000-gallon tanks for a couple of piddling boreholes. This is the part where having a manager or client with a basic understanding of geology really helps.

fun stuff to drill through (1)

I got a comment on my last post about drilling in karst vs. in other places. Most of the environmental drilling done on the east coast is within the top 20 feet of the surface, because that's where the water is. And within that upper zone, you are more likely to encounter soil (overburden) than bedrock.

Bedrock adds all sorts of complications to drilling, but even staying above the bedrock can be troublesome. For example, the heaving sand I alluded to in my last post.

If you're drilling in a valley or another area with a significant thickness of overburden, it's not uncommon to drill through layers of saturated soil which may act as barriers to vertical flow. If you go through those layers, you may encounter material which is slightly pressurized (confined), and when you punch a hole through, you open a space that has significantly less pressure. That water (and the soil) wants to go up. That's fine if you're drilling through material that has a decent amount of silt or clay, or perhaps has lots of gravel. But if you're drilling through nice, relatively clean sand (of pretty much any size), that sand will flow with the water. Especially because the drill rods have been vibrating as they've been chewing their way down. And you end up with flowing/running/heaving sand. That is, when you pause to take a sample or to add another rod, sand flows/runs/heaves upward into the drill stem and binds everything up. Or, you stop for the day and come back the next morning to find that your drill rods been pushed way up out of the hole and you've got 80 feet of steel waving around in the breeze.

There are ways to minimize this. One way is to make sure you always keep the inside of the drill stem full of water, so there's some pressure acting to keep that sand back. You can also add "drilling mud" - a clay or polymer - to your drilling water to hold things back, although often in environmental applications you're not allowed to add anything fancy that may interfere with later samples or well installation. Or you can close your eyes and try and get through those layers as fast as possible, and then seal your casing/drill stem into something that won't flow, like a clay bed or bedrock.

In certain environments, such as coastal areas, heaving sand just comes with the territory. I've had big sites with scores of boreholes drilled, and one particular 15-20 foot zone is just blank with "heaving sand" for every single boring log because every time you stop to get a sample, you just get loose, undifferentiated slop from who-knows-where. Nothing's wrong with the driller or the rig geologist - it's just the way the stratigraphy is.

geoscience career stats

This is old news, but I only saw it recently...

The American Geosciences Institute has a series of newsletters regarding the state of the industry here. I was particularly interested in number 068, which compares the 2011-2012 geoscience student cohort to previous years. The number of bachelors degrees awarded (a little more than 3,000) seems awfully low nation-wide - I guess we are a small industry.

Number 063 and 064 from last year compares median and starting salaries for a number of different geoscience-related occupations. I wasn't surprised to see relatively low starting wages for environmentally-based occupations (oh, how I know about those), but the overall median range for non-technicians is pretty similar.

Anything in these newsletters strike you as surprising?

boxes and circles

I wonder if this happens to other people...

So, we're discussing something complicated, or I'm trying to provide a semi-to-scale diagram. I start blocking it out on a pad of calculation/graph paper, but then I run out of room. Or I decide it needs to be a little neater than the last version.

No problem, I can just make a bunch of boxes and lines in powerpoint or excel. That's a cinch to manipulate, right? Then I end up making refinements, and someone suggests a few more details, and suddenly I've spent 3 hours essentially drawing a picture with boxes, lines, and other fragments. Like this:

(for non environmental geologists, the above picture is two monitoring wells screened in different aquifers)

... Or perhaps I'm trying to show information on a map for a casual discussion. So I print out a copy, start circling features of interest, and decide that the resulting mess would be impossible to scan and send out of the office.

That's ok, I have Adobe Acrobat. I'll just add little circles to my PDF, and add little labels, and then I'll need some sort of legend... before I know it, I've spent another 3 hours making circles when I should have just gotten my friendly CADD or GIS expert to put the locations on the map accurately in the first place.

Yes, I did build a very complicated series of figures out of itty-bitty excel rows and columns for my thesis. Perhaps I should get some actual graphical software...

field course requirements

My previous posts (here and here) discussed geology field studies course costs and alternatives, respectively. But all this discussion of field courses started me thinking: are field study courses still required, and should they be?

When I was poking around the internet, I looked at my undergrad and graduate field study requirements. My old undergraduate program doesn't appear to have a field study course requirement (which was definitely in place when I was there), although the website is not totally clear. The undergrad program at my grad school has multiple geology tracks, each of which requires at least one field method course.

As I mentioned a few months ago, I'm a strong believer in having students move beyond the textbooks and developing their own interpretations, whether it's by examining rock samples in a laboratory or trying to determine why the local landscape looks the way it does. Most geology courses have this to some degree. So is a specific field method course still needed?

I think it is. A good geology field study course will not only involve using standard equipment to do basic geologic fieldwork, but will also show how to present the data in a standard format. How do you fill out a logbook? What information do you need to show, and how much detail do you need to go into for each entry? How do you collect, import, and use coordinates from your GPS, and what are some of the common pitfalls in using and evaluating spatial data?

There are very few branches of geology which are not based on field data. And if you're going to evaluate that data, you need to understand some of the circumstances under which it was collected or at least be able to critically evaluate how reliable it actually is.

geo field course options

In my previous post, I mentioned that I couldn't afford the fancier field study course offered by my college.

I did take care of my field study course requirement with a traditional course that involved a lot of primitive camping and bouncing across the landscape in woefully not-offroad-ready 15-passenger vans. In our case, we were using reserved college vans we'd driven out west. We spent most of the trip in arid, remote areas (likely because it's much easier for students to map geology where the land isn't buried under vegetation and "no trespassing" signs).

I did some poking around the internet, and there are a bunch of geology field study courses available for students who aren't able to attend their school's own courses. For example, course listings are available here, here, and here. The 4 to 6 week summer course appears to be standard, and although courses are available in more exotic areas (islands of Greece! Antarctica! New Zealand!), the cheaper ones will be the ones you can at least road-trip to.

Prerequisites and course rigor (both physical and intellectual) will vary widely. For my field course, the students were pretty much universally out of shape compared to the professors, who appeared to spend their free time running up and down mountains. So we did a lot of huffing and puffing after them. The expected timeframe for doing the courses will also vary by school. I did my field study course the summer after my freshman year - it had no hard prerequisites other than an intro geology course. Other field courses may have a long list of prerequisites or a focus on a particular area, such as geophysical or environmental sampling techniques.

So the final question is, do you need a field study course at all? That's for the next installment...

field course costs

One of my undergraduate course requirements was a field study course. The department had a traditional 6-week course in the summer every other year, but it also had a 3-week course in Europe that was quite a bit more expensive.

I did the 6-week course, which had a reasonable "course fee" (I recall it being around $300) and allowed us to stay (camp) in our dorm rooms for the first week. After that, the lodging ranged from dirt-cheap hotels to campgrounds with some degree of amenities to camping in the middle of nowhere. My school didn't charge tuition by the credit, so it didn't cost me anything more than that (plus food/laundry costs, which I'd need to pay for anyway).

I was initially curious about the European short course, which was paired with a normal-term half-credit course to make up a full credit. But the course was offered by the time I'd gotten cynical about the department, and I wasn't sure I wanted to go. The kicker, though, was that there was no way for me to afford it. There was some vague hand-waving about "additional financial aid", which I didn't think I would qualify for, and which sounded it was only for dire financial necessity. They also wanted commitments early in the process (like, a week after the initial informational meeting).

I was not an unusually (or even usually) disadvantaged student. I graduated with minimal debt that I paid off almost immediately. I hadn't really had my educational plans stymied by money before. But it made me think - if I skipped a field study course because of not just financial constraints, but because the people in charge blithely assumed that cost wasn't a factor, how many other people self-selected out of other field courses because of cost?

As I was writing this post, I got all fired up about field study course issues. So this week will be The Week of Field Studies. Stay tuned!

geology is everywhere!

This month's accretionary wedge is about seeing geology in different places.

I have mentioned before that I am not a hard-rock geologist. I don't get excited about rocks and minerals, although I'll certainly take note of a particularly impressive specimen.

However, I have been known to randomly stop by the side of the road when I see something interesting - like weathering!

As a geologist, I notice not only the interesting shapes, but I also consider the processes that worked together to make that feature.

Sure, the erosion of this material makes for nifty roadside shapes, but what does this mean for land stability? Maybe you'd reconsider buying this house a short distance away...

the Brunton

I'm not sure how much this diminishes my credibility as a geologist, but I do not own a Brunton compass.

(photo from here)

What distinguishes a Brunton (sorry, pocket transit) is that you can measure dip angles and compass headings with remarkable precision, it's small (if not light), and it's bulletproof. The ones we used in college and grad school had been manhandled by generations of students and worked fine.

Last time I needed to determine fracture orientation in the field, I had to scrounge around for a pocket transit that I could borrow from someone else, since my organization didn't have one. When I started asking around, I found that about 20% of geologists had their own pocket transit. My sample may be biased low, because these were the people who knew I was looking to borrow one. Other owners may have kept quiet because they weren't willing to share an admittedly expensive gizmo.

The pocket transit I used worked out fine, but since I was using a personal, very expensive item, I was petrified of dropping it or scratching the mirror - a real possibility, considering the rocks I was scrambling about on. I've been keeping an eye on eBay - they turn up regularly at prices ranging from less than $100 for dusty old finds to $700 or so for unused ones.

If I were a structural geologist, I'd definitely have a pocket transit. But I rarely need to go out and assess outcrops. Readers, if you do structural-type stuff a lot, do you still use a trusty 50+ year old product, or do you have something newer/fancier/better?

MOOCs and geology

Janet Stemwedel has a new post up regarding the use of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in (replacing) university classes. Would MOOCs work for teaching geology?

I doubt it.

Geology is an applied science of observation, of going outside and looking at stuff (rocks, soil), and trying to piece together what happened. Often, you need to use most of your senses (ok, don't try tasting stuff in the environmental biz). Taped lectures will have examples of what to look for, but you really need to be given a bunch of samples or to go out and ponder road cuts and learn how to figure things out on your own. Is that a natural fracture, or did someone manhandle the sample? Which direction is "up"? How did those rocks get smushed together like that? How can I get a reliable indicator of fracture orientation in this mess? Being a good geologist is only partly about learning facts, and is more about developing an eye for important observations.

And being a successful environmental consultant is about more than just knowing your facts. It's about being able to use different lines of evidence to determine what's going on out there, and to evaluate other folk's theories. It's about writing reports that don't actively piss off the target audience. I've harped on this before, but the critical evaluation and writing skills I got from my small liberal arts college (SLAC) were what allowed me to progress quickly from where I started as a field tech. And my expensive, labor-intensive SLAC must have done something right according to my management, because my office hired a succession of new grads from that same program for years after I paved the way.

If I had no ability to access good teachers and relevant samples, then a MOOC would help to get some of the basic science down. So would a good textbook. But I'd have a serious deficiency in my understanding of geology if I didn't have someone to call attention to my bad habits and show me where my interpretations were going astray.