Geologist Keeps Track of Their Work Travels, Even Looking at the Result Is Tiring

Are you considering a career as a Geologist? Do you like traveling, a lot? Then this Redditor might inspire you to complete your studies and land that dream job.

Of course, if the prospect of a long haul flight on a Monday morning doesn't appeal to you then this might not be the career path for you!

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How much traveling does a geologist make?

A Redditor called u/pie made an interesting post today. As a Field Geologist, they revealed just how busy their working life is. 

Their job requires them to travel around the world to work onboard offshore exploration vessels on the hunt for hydrocarbon deposits. But it's not all plain sailing, their job requires a fair bit of data processing, as you might expect.

"It's about 50% signal processing, 40% computer science, 10% geology, and 100% putting up with obnoxious sailors," they explain. 

Nothing really newsworthy there, as most exploration and field geologists, will tell you travel is something of an occupational hazard. But what is most striking is just how many air miles they managed to rack up over 5 years -- in excess of 1 million air miles!

"In the Pacific, the blue one is Rarotonga or Cook islands. Once was a crew change off our ship as we were transiting from Australia back through to South America and it was the closest available port.

The other time was a family vacation as my parents live near LA. The white one is Easter Island. I admit that was a personal trip as I was in SA at the time for another project and had the chance to go." they added. 

But it appears all that travel while exciting in their youth, has taken its toll. They have decided to leave their job after 5 years. 

"Don't get me wrong. Other than the actual act of traveling, I loved the job otherwise. I liked the people I worked with and the job itself was interesting and often fun. I just got to the point in life where traveling all the time just no longer appealed to me and decided to bail out. [It] was great fun while it lasted," u/pie explained. 

How did they make the map?

Using nothing more than old boarding passes, MS excel and GC Mapper, they were able to generate this stunning map. First, they entered the flight details into a spreadsheet and sorted it alphabetically. 

Then they concatenated the origin and destination names and counted the number of instances of them. They created a color-code for each line to represent the following:-

• White lines were 2 or fewer trips,
• Blue lines represent 3 to 4 trips,
• Green lines represent 5 to 6 trips,
• Orange lines represent 6 to 8 trips, and;
• Red lines are for 8 or more trips. 

With all this in hand, they then exported the data into a text file and imported that into GC Mapper. The result was quite surprising.

What's more, most of those hours were not in business class.

According to another Redditor, fintheman, you can make a similar map yourself using TripIt, your email, and data exported from openflights.org.

TripIt is a handy little application that can be used to organize and plan your travels. 

"Unlike other travel apps, TripIt can organize your travel plans no matter where you book. Simply forward your confirmation emails to [email protected] and in a matter of seconds, TripIt will create a master itinerary for every trip." - TripIt.

Openflights.org, is a great free-to-use website that lets you track flights around the world. It's very useful for those wondering if their flight is delayed, or to check on the progress of your family members' flight prior to pickup.