Geology: The office job?

I didn’t get into geology to work a 9-5 inside an office, but that’s what I am doing. It’s a different type of geology work. I am trying to interpret the geology of a place I have never been to, and have only seen a select few rocks from. There seems to be a body of terms and structures that are known but not explained, and change names over the old property boundary, or do they? That’s the question. It has been a challenge keeping my sanity doing data entry. So let us start with the beginning.

First job I had entailed entering header information on drill holes. That meant that I had to enter the x,y,z, ( if they were there) along with the azmuth, dip, location, and length of each drill hole. Okay, well there were hundreds. The weeks I spent doing this I got to over 200 a shift. Mind you I had to take some breaks otherwise I would have died from boredom and my brain melting from misuse. So I chugged through the monotony of this job thinking “how is my degree required to do this?” and eventually I was given a new job.

This new job was so packed full of geology I could hardly contain my excitement! That is until I started working on it. This next assignment had to do with some maps the engineers were printing. My job was to interpret the geology and find the veins on them, and locate mining targets. There were 88 that had to be done in two weeks Ok, simple enough if this structures and geology made any sense! Now let me give you an introduction to the geology of this mine. It is old rock. I am talking Archean meta-everything. There are volcanics, intrusives, banded iron formation, and all of it has been faulted, metamorphosed, intruded into and faulted again. So trying to trace a single part of a unit is pretty hopeless. The more I looked at the drill hole data, and the sections that we had from an old owners of the mine, the more I realized that really all the old geologist had done was guess, they had no idea where one dyke unit was compared to another one, they just played connect the dots with dotted lines. Section to section things didn’t even match so really my guessing is about as correct as the old Senior Geologists. Now as confusing as this job has been I was enjoying it a little bit. So of course I was given another job. Now mind you all of these had to be done NOW! OMG THE WORLD WILL END IF IT’S NOT DONE!

So the next job, this one includes autocad, yay learning things! This job was to enter the moil data into the model. Okay I’ll back up, when they extend the drifts in the mine they sample the face before blasting again. These samples are called moils. Fun stuff, now I get to sort through it. So with the autocad I am finding the locations of the start of each moil since the locations are given in feet from a survey point. Then I go back and type in the assay data. While this is not that hard on its own, I am new at autocad and keep tripping myself up.

So there you have it, how geology can be an office job. Still I think I would prefer to be logging core or supervising a drilling project, but this is what I have right now, and for the rest of the summer. I am going to miss doing field work this summer but c’est la vie, and hopefully soon I will be back outside, the reason I got into geology.