What will the uses of geology be in the future?
What is the future of Geology?
Given the world population – I expect hydrology and environmental geologic studies generally will be ‘big’. I don’t expect metal and non-metal mining to go away, because people will need ‘things’ including buildings, roads, bridges and machines of all sorts – but I do expect that robotics will play a bigger role in the actual mining processes, but geologists will still be needed for exploration and development.
Oceanography, seismology (earthquake studies) and volcanology (volcano studies) will certainly be expanding – we are only barely beginning to get ideas about how to predict and manage risk from natural earth processes.