Earth works

摘要

Mention geoscience and people often imagine trekking to far-flung regions to hammer rocks. But the discipline offers a wide range of opportunities beyond this. "There's room for those who love field work, and there's room for those who don't," says Eric Calais, a geophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who has spent time in the field studying the movements and deformations of Earth's tectonic plates in Ethiopia, Siberia and Indonesia. Calais recently left the lab again - this time as science adviser to the United Nations Development Program's mission to quake-torn Haiti, where he is helping to develop public-safety policy and working with local scientists, government officials and international aid workers to build a national agency for seismic risk reduction. "Data analysts, computer modellers - geoscience needs all types of researchers," he notes.