The Other Side of Geology

Cairo August 2010

The Other Side of Geology

By Dr. Mohamed El Gazzar

I have been a "Field Geologist" since graduation in 1963 where I did work in several countries in the world. However I did not discover the other side until 20 years ago!

Is it because I was busy making a career or I did not have enough experience to discover this side of the profession?

To understand why there is another side, we should first define who the "Geologist" is and what is his scope of work, etc…

For example the Engineer has a scope that does not go further than his factory or machine shop etc. And the Doctor, his world is limited to the clinic or hospital etc.

But For a "Geologist", the scope of work covers the whole earth and more than that his client is more than 4.5 billion years age.

I was Resident at USA since late 1968 and granted the nationality in the middle of 1970's but returned back to native country Egypt late 1980's and since that time I was working out of Egypt as I established a US-Egyptian Company in the field of Petroleum and Natural Resources serving Middle-East, East-Africa and other several countries.

During This Period Of time, I discovered that "Geology" is not only a career but it has a deep link with society and people, more than that it is part of the daily problems facing the society.

So I started to think how I can illustrate this in Writing and through the period of early 1990 I tried to comment on several problems and events occurred in Egypt, where "Geology" is playing the Prime factor such as 1990's Earthquake, problems facing new cities etc…

Despite the fact that most of the subjects I wrote about were mainly concerned with problems related to "Geology", I wrote some other articles showing several aspects of "Geology" that can be used as a touristic item such as "Sinai the Land of Prophets", "Fossil Wood of Egypt", "The Bright Side of Gabal Al Qatarani" etc…

Hopefully these subjects could be of any interest or benefits…