Why geophysics?

JesseC

A computational geologist at a good London university told me "I'm shite at maths."... his colleague, turned to me and said, "He isn't being modest, he really is shite at maths." XD. I still think he WAS being modest of course...

billiards

In terms of maths skillz (typically):

Geophysicist ≠ Geologist

Mathematician > Physicist > Geophysicist > Geologist > Non-scientist

As for anecdotes, I recently attended a software engineering course also attended by a group of particle physicists, neurobiologists, economists, mechanical engineers, and geographers. One task was to write an algorithm to find the co-ordinates of the overlapping region given the co-ordinates of two overlapping squares (with aligned vertices). The geophysicists in the room realised the problem could be solved 1-dimension at a time and wrote the nicest, most general algorithm in the room. The others wrote messy algorithms that required the user to input the leftmost square co-ordinates first and solved the problem in an awkward way. That is, apart from the particle physicists, who could not figure out an algorithm at all!

timacho

i'm a undergraduate student, studying in pure geology, but i love geophysics very much.
any advice for me?
please..

Sabian

I think it's a bit late to answer the original poster but I'll write how I ended up as an undergrad student of Geophysics myself.

Luckily it's not a long story, in high school although I liked almost everything, the only things I would keep thinking out of the classroom where Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Because of some awful chemistry teachers the list was narrowed to Maths and Physics; but I was (and still am) kind of scared of a work devoted to research (and at the time I didn't know of such things as applied maths or physics). Then while I was trying to figure out what engineering was I going to study (like if it was the inmediate logic step from Physics and Math to something more applied), some teacher suggested Geology and while looking into that, I ran into Geophysics. So I signed up for this and I liked it, even though I hadn't had all the disciplines of geophysics itself (until now most has been math, physics and stuff).
As for a job, what I like it's that if I ever have the feeling research it's not my thing (due to capability or to style or whatever) it's not that difficult to change direction and go and work in some oil company (at least for people graduating at my university I've seen that) in a more "mainstream" job.

The field that, I think, I'm most interested in, is Thermodynamics in the Earth's interior. Sadly there isn't research about that in my uni so I don't really have anyone to chat about that for now and it's something I'll have to figure out in this year I have towards finishing Bachelor's. By the way, has anyone any book to recommend on this topic?

Jay_

Apart from Physics Forums, you could find forums related to Geophysics in particular too. You might get nice responses there and could even ask about universities for further studies, because I am sure there would be people there who have studied the field and would know.

This for instance: http://forum.detectation.com/

Seems pretty active, like the last post was today.

Jay_

Thats actually quiet surprising given that particle physics has many equations and a fairly good depth of mathematics. For squares its not really a difficult problem either.

jbrussell93

Thanks for sharing. I'm going through a similar situation myself, in that I'm interested in a lot of things. I switched this semester to physics from biological engineering because I realized that I'm primarily interested in the science and discovery and not so much in the applications.

It's kind of interesting how my interests have evolved actually. My interest in science was sparked during a summer field biology experience in high school. It was mainly pertaining to field work with birds and some water quality stuff but I absolutely loved it. It mainly just acted as the catalyst that sparked my curiosity, as I began to branch out from there to other sciences and eventually discovered physics. I was fascinated by it and wanted to major in physics but was told that it wasn't wise so I just decided that engineering was close enough... but it wasn't. The earth sciences seem like the perfect field for someone like me though. Can't just choose one narrow specialty, but instead wants a field that requires knowledge from all of the sciences. Not to mention you get to do some fieldwork!