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The next (snake) oil boom and birth of the new species—Lupus Geophysicus

A note of fatherly advice to geophysics students everywhere

University of Oklahoma, Norman, U.S.

Corresponding author: J. Castagna, castagna@ou.edu

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

In this second age of the robber barons we are seeing the already penny-wise and pound-foolish attitude of oil industry management carried to new heights of—not stupidity, because there is cold calculating intent involved; not insanity, because the logic is impeccable if perverse— the only appropriate descriptor I can find is illness; a pervasive, debilitating disease borne of greed and manifested by a ubiquitous shortsightedness that is unfortunately terminal for the world many of us knew.

"Stop whining!" you say. My intention is not to whine. After all, I am a stockholder who welcomes his 6+ figure profits. My intention, rather, is to point out the limitless opportunity that lies before each of us as a result.

As I walk the halls of historic edifices where miracles of science once occurred and which are now manned by skeleton crews who are nothing more than forlorn hopes doomed to extinction, I feel like a scavenger in a postapocalyptic Mad Max movie—a piece of hardware here, a world-class geophysicist there; thousands of lines of computer code or bits of data achieving oneness with the cosmos by disaggregating into component electrons and achieving oblivion. The portraits of Technical Achievement Award winners still decorate the walls. They still look at you, those faces showing high intelligence, extreme competence, and fierce pride. It makes me wonder what I should say to students in a "Careers" issue. Well, here goes.

Get used to it! So you got laid off without severance one week before your report date. So you spent the . . . [Full Text of this Article]