A Propensity to Talk Density: A Geology Student Gets the Rock Facts About Airborne Surveys

When James Davies, a third-year undergrad geology major from the University of Birmingham, saw BBC footage about a Bell Geospace survey in Cornwall, he got in touch with Bell looking for a potential internship and industry advice. Well, Bell Geo’s Julianne Sharples couldn’t finagle an internship for Davies (yet). Still, she did bring Davies onto A Propensity to Talk Density to pick the brain of Liam Clark, a Geoscientist with Bell Geospace. Clark’s five years in the industry and Master’s Degrees in Geoscience and Economic Geology made him the perfect person to speak with Davies on the career potentials in the geology field.

The big question on Davies’ mind and his fellow geology students was what to do with themselves once they graduate. There are so many different exciting paths to go down. Clarke empathized with Davies as he remembered that feeling of getting ready to leave university and wonder what the future held.

“My role at Bell Geo is basically data QC,” Clark said. “We get a lot of data sent in, and we QC it before it goes through interpretation. But I also do a lot of planning of surveys. So, the airplane we have flies around, and we have to plan the survey of the area. A lot of my daily routine is set up to create survey plans for the airplane to fly and to collect the data of where it’s going to be.”

Davies’s appetite whetted for the exciting possibilities of a career in geology; he wanted to know how Clark broke into the industry.

Clark mentioned his master’s work doing data analysis for an Oil & Gas company in London as a good start on his road before moving north to Edinburgh, where he got some field experience. It was during his second Master’s program in Finland where Clark started to get the sense of where his true interests lay. Two of those passions, exploration and promoting green industries, are two things Clark gets exposure to working at Bell Geospace.