A U.S. human resource challenge for Earth science education and energy exploration and exploitation

Abstract

The impetus to write this article stems from a special session at SEG's 2010 Annual Meeting on “Interaction between Academia and Industry.” The session articulated important issues that both industry and academia involved with Earth sciences have to deal with and the panelists and authors of this paper decided to meet at two subsequent meetings in Houston in the spring of 2011 as an ad-hoc group. The group was engaged in the discussion because of the importance of the human resources issue. The group focused on the problem of a severe manpower shortage that is predicted in the Earth science field in the near future. This article summarizes the issue with data and possible solutions.