Murder, monsters, occupational hazards: Why movie geologists die so often

From ScienceMag:

As an asteroid hurtles toward Earth in the 1998 movie Armageddon, a geologist teams up with a veteran oil rig team on a desperate mission: Land on the space rock, drill into its surface, and detonate a nuclear bomb deep inside. They succeed, but the geologist, played by Steve Buscemi, is one of few who make it home alive.

According to a new study of movie geologists, he was lucky. Out of 202 movie geologists found in 141 movies released between 1919 and 2023, 69 die on screen or are found dead—a mortality rate of about one-third, according to a paper published last month in Geology Today. The authors, several geologists–slash–movie buffs, began their analysis more than a decade ago and have provided regular updates, although this is the first in a scientific journal.

To qualify for the catalog, a movie had to feature someone explicitly identified as a geologist on screen. Most appeared in adventure, action, drama, or science fiction movies. The earliest films they found featuring geologists were often Westerns, where many characters were prospecting for oil. More recent films focus on natural disasters, monsters, and extraterrestrial threats.

Murder was found to be the leading cause of the fictional geologists’ deaths, responsible for 30 of the fatalities. Geological hazards, including falling into a crater and drowning in quicksand, accounted for another 12 deaths, tied with those involving aliens—the massive worms in the Tremors movies are thought to have come from off planet although the star geologists survive in those flicks. In a one-off case, a geologist in 1971’s Walkabout commits suicide after reading a textbook in the Australian outback. The authors note that they “hope this does not provoke demands for warning texts on structural geology textbooks!”

Despite the cinematic death rate, film geologists are generally portrayed in a positive light—85% were classified by the paper’s authors as morally “good” characters, and 19% perform heroic acts. The new analysis also notes the scientists are most often portrayed by white men, mirroring demographic imbalances in real-life geology. Only 22 of the 202 onscreen geologists were women, although this representation improved after the 1990s. The researchers found just six Black geologists and none of Asian, Indian, Pacific Islander, or Hispanic descent.

The authors suggest cinematic geologists are emblematic of changing cultural concerns over time, from oil exploration and Cold War fears to environmental catastrophes. Across the decades, though, geologists on the big screen are consistently portrayed as scientifically competent, often heroic, and usually doomed.

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