Volcanologist
You study volcanoes — the places where the ground is thin and the planet shows what it's made of. Part of the job is knowing when to walk away.
A day looks like
- You hike up to a vent to collect gas, wearing a mask because the air isn't breathable.
- You watch a line on a screen creep upward and decide whether it means anything yet.
- You call the people who live on the slope and tell them what you know and what you don't.
Where you have already seen this
- The evacuation announced days before an eruption was somebody reading instruments, not a guess.
- The dark rock in a museum drawer that came out of a mountain and was dated by a laboratory.
- Aeroplanes rerouted around ash — a chart drawn by people watching a volcano that week.
How you get there
- 01A degree in geology or earth science first, then a masters or doctorate specialising in volcanic activity.
- 02Most of the work sits inside a university, a national geological survey or a volcano observatory.
- 03Fieldwork is a small part of the year; the rest is instruments, data and models.
- 04Related routes into the same observatories exist through geophysics, chemistry and remote sensing.
- Subjects that help
- Geography · Chemistry · Physics · Mathematics
- Typical pay, US median
- $101,920
- O*NET OnLine, Geoscientists, Except Hydrologists and Geographers (19-2042.00), 2025
You might recognise this if
- You've wanted to get closer to a storm rather than further from it.
- You've kept a record of something changing over days or weeks.
Try this week
Find out which volcano is closest to where you live — the answer is usually a surprise — and when it last erupted.
Near this
- Agronomist
- Marine Biologist
- Civil Engineer
This is one of 48 kinds of work in the same map. Grow Up Quest is how a parent finds which of them their child actually responds to — not by asking the child what they want to be, but by recording what they have already been seen doing.