The birth of ‘Geology is the way’

The Geology is the way page started more than a decade ago, on the 7th of January, 2012, when I was a little more than a geology student.

I would really like to claim that Geology is the way – at the time known with its Italian name “Scienze Geologiche” – started with great things in mind. The reality is that I simply liked the subject and honestly wanted to share some nice geological posts.

The same is true for the website. I have often thought about creating a geological website, but it is the kind of effort that takes time and money and doing a career in research, jumping from a fixed-term position to the other, is not exactly the kind of career that gives you much freedom.

Until one day…. there was a global pandemic that locked all of us up in their homes, which wasn’t exactly the kind of ‘motivation’ that I was looking for, but that ultimately pushed me to create this website.

I then asked myself… what kind of website should I create? A very simple geological website for everybody or one very specific with more information for students and researchers? The answer to me was simple: both.

Learning geology is beautiful but intimidating. On one hand, you want to learn about the planet you live on. On the other hand, this learning goes trough a lot of jargon and a discipline that uses chemistry, physics, and biology to study what’s under our feet. Jargon, in particular, is something really difficult to avoid in the geosciences, a discipline that has spent centuries giving proper names to minerals, rocks, structures, and geological processes.

In my opinion, it is right to simplify, but it is not right to omit complex topics and not trying to explain everything in the correct detail. Therefore, I decided to structure this website in a way that – yes – things are explained in the simplest way as possible and the reader is progressively moved into more complex geological subjects.

In the blog, I will be (or at least try to be) as simplest as possible, introducing geology in the field in places where everyone can go and “touch” the geology with their own hands.

In the pages, I will try to keep the text simple, but I will also go deeper with more details about minerals, geological structures, and processes. 

If you have any suggestions to improve these pages, please do not hesitate to contact me! Also, feel free to support me through the same page, if you would like to!

P.S: I would like to thank Elenora, Hannah, and David for pushing me to write for the Features From The Field on the EGU blog and Callan for his inspiring work on Mountain Beltway! It’s also thanks to them that I have found the motivation to start my own blog!