Geotripper Rates Hollywood Movie Geologists (AND, see "Tremors" at the State Theatre on May 20!)

One of my earliest blog posts (in 2008) was a list of my favorite depictions of geologists in movies. I've revisited it once or twice. It came to mind as we prepare to offer a showing of "Tremors" as a geology field studies fundraiser at the State Theatre in Modesto on May 20th at 7 pm. If you would like to attend or donate to our field studies fund, please check out the first comment!

What are the best depictions of geologists in movies? I have the definitive list below! I listed my number one choice, but the others are in random order.

As will be seen from my list, my taste in movies runs towards action-adventure as opposed to the "sophisticated" cinema ("There will be Blood" with Daniel Day-Lewis would otherwise take the top spot). But frankly, no movie with a geologist can exist without action and adventure...

Despite having grown up in southern California, and having lived through the 1971 Sylmar quake, I have never taken a picture of the Hollywood sign, so I offer a photo of a favorite Hollywood set, especially in the old westerns: the cliffs of Red Rock Canyon State Park on Highway 14 in the Mojave Desert. The rocks are Miocene continental floodplain sediments lifted up by fault motions on the Garlock and El Paso fault systems. Dr. Grant should be scaring that little kid with a velociraptor claw any moment now!

My favorite geologists in the movies:

And the winner is: Finn Carter as seismology graduate student Rhonda LeBeck!

1) Tremors (1990): Finn Carter as seismology student Rhonda LeBeck.

Speaking from an entirely gender-biased point of view, Finn wins my vote as the finest portrayal of a geologist in a Hollywood movie. Intelligent and creative, and cute, too. And finding strange underground worm things using a seismometer. The backdrop of the Eastern Sierra Nevada and Alabama Hills was an extra-special plus.

2) San Andreas (2015): Rock (Dwayne Johnson) as a character of some sort, and Paul Giamatti as a paunchy bearded hero geology professor named Hayes. I reviewed the movie in this post from 2015. I was struck that the "hero" of the movie saved around four people, while the "B"-plot geologist saved maybe millions of lives. The movie was also notable for showing a fellow geologist who was Asian (but he died in the movie, of course). 

The real hero of "San Andreas"

3) Volcano (1997): Laurie Latham as Rachel, Anne Heche as Dr. Amy Barnes (honorable mention)

Rachel didn't get much credit for being the first Hollywood geologist to get sucked into a volcano, but she displayed many of the traits of the real geologist: self-effacing, nervous in front of cameras, and yet a good and perceptive researcher. Of course, she wasn't a leading character. The actual 'star' of the film, Anne Heche gets honorable mention for looking at a topographic map on-screen, but then using a basketball to confirm that a street does in fact slope downhill the wrong way.

The smarter of the two geologists in "Volcano" (other than getting sucked into the lava)

4) Dante's Peak (1997): Pierce Brosnan (!) as Dr. Harry Dalton, Charles Hallahan as Paul Dreyfus, Grant Heslov as Greg and others

James Bond as volcanologist?? Well, I dunno...too clean-cut, too shaven, too cultured. Now, the rest of his team, though, they were more like the people I see and work with on a regular basis. Coffee addicts, intense, and lovers of volcanoes. Some of the portrayals of geological processes were done pretty well, except for that really fast-moving Hollywood lava, and driving a truck through said flow without dying from the radiant heat. And that acid lake that killed grandma. And that overly steep giant Hollywood volcano in Idaho (!). I really liked the bridge that got washed out at the end of the movie, though.

Well done, special effects people! Seems like they should have let the van go first, though.

5) King Kong (1976): Rene Auberjonois as Bagley

In his pre-"Deep Space Nine" days, Rene played a geologist who thought that the mysterious uncharted island was hiding a lot of oil. When shown to be wrong, he did what many geologists are known to do...he got drunk.

I think he would have been drunk even if it was oil.

6) Erin Brokovich (2000): Julia Roberts in the title role

The first scene of the movie had Julia Roberts saying "I love geology". I melted on the spot and was hers from that point on. Though she was actually a legal clerk and not a geologist, she was shown researching groundwater chemistry, taking samples of poisoned water, pulling dead rotting animals from wells, and running away from security guards after trespassing on company property. All in a day's work for any field geologist, I should think.

This is why I'm a geologist, not a biologist.

7) Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones

O.K., so he was really an archaeologist, but he dug in the earth a lot, and the character was said to be based on Roy Chapman Andrews, an adventuring paleontologist who explored the Mongolian deserts in search of ancient life in the 1920's. His expeditions found the now renowned Flaming Cliffs which contained fossils of protoceratops, oviraptor, and that most famous of movie dinosaurs, velociraptor. His party also discovered the nests of some dinosaurs, containing egg clutches in concentric circles, and some very rare Cretaceous mammals. They were chased by bandits and assaulted by horrible dust storms. And what geologist doesn't dream of dramatic adventures in the field? Also, in the third movie there were earthquakes, and the ground opened up and swallowed people!

8) Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic Park III (2001): Sam Neill as Dr. Alan Grant.

His character was ok, but I was most impressed by the office trailer for the paleontology dig in Montana; messy, dusty, newspaper clippings on the wall, lunch mixed with research; a true geology office! The third movie in the series mostly had people getting eaten, but as usual, the dinosaurs looked pretty cool.

This looks suspiciously like my own laboratory...

9) The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2 (1997):

Come to think of it, there weren't many paleontologists in this movie, except the guy in cowboy hat with the long beard who looked a lot like Robert Bakker. I think he got eaten by a velociraptor...(Update: I completely forgot that Julianne Moore was most certainly a paleontologist in the movie).

10) The Core (2003):

I don't really remember much about the geologists, but I loved the "element" they used to drill into the mantle and core in only two or three days; it was called "Unobtainium" (which was also in the plot for "Avatar"). And that giant mantle amethyst geode was pretty cool, even if the crystals killed some of the crew members.

11) Bringing Up Baby (1938): Cary Grant as Dr. David Huxley.

Handsome guy, looking for a dinosaur bone with beautiful Katherine Hepburn at her best, a pesky dog and a pair of leopards. What more could you ask?

12) Eight Below (2006): Bruce Greenwood as Dr. David McClaren.

A geologist willing to ride a dogsled for a week, face down avalanches, blizzards, crevasses, frostbite, a broken leg, and a fall into freezing cold water, all so he could find a meteorite in Antarctica. How he knew to look for that particular meteorite on a rocky mountainside as opposed to the surface of a glacier, I don't know. And they left those poor dogs behind....

13) 2012 (2009): Chiwetel Ejiofor as Adrian Helmsley.

2012 was notable for having an African-American as the lead geologist in an otherwise ridiculous movie. He provided the moral center for the hard decisions being made about the future of humanity. I give my students an assignment on finding geologists in movies, and this role comes up more than any other. Woody Harrelson, while not a geologist character, wins honorable mention for best geology-related death in a movie, as he is incinerated by the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera.

If I'm 95 and sick, I want to go this way too.

While researching for this post, I came across an excellent review of geologists in movies in Earth Magazine which actually analyzes whether geologists were women or minorities, whether they were evil or not, and whether they survived to the end of the movie. I highly recommend it! 

Which movies did I miss? Please contribute to the comments!

A Geologist (also named Hayes) Sits Through "San Andreas", the Movie

What the heck is this? These are fault slickensides (scraping marks from fault motions) at Hoover Dam. Where the movie says there are no faults.

I love sitting through geology-based movies, so I can sit and smirk at the screen and criticize the horrible geology presented therein. And thus, I expected to do the same this afternoon, when I finally found time to catch "San Andreas". Mind you, there were plenty of geological issues with the movie, but I have to admit I actually enjoyed myself. It was entertaining. So here are some of the thoughts from another geologist named Hayes (the main geologist character in the movie was Lawrence Hayes. I'd feel complimented, but I noticed the movie's screenwriters, at least at some point, were also named Hayes. Plus, CalTech would never hire me).

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
Let's get the biggest spoiler out of the way first. Hoover Dam, Los Angeles, and San Francisco get destroyed in this movie. Strangely enough, Bakersfield gets nailed pretty badly too. The Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge get destroyed. If I was the maintenance guy for the Hollywood Sign, I'd be pretty tired of constantly replacing it by now.

Hoover Dam. It has its faults...

So, the opening scene as I recall involved a distracted young lady driving a mountain highway in the San Gabriel Mountains. A rock hits her windshield, and over the side she goes, at a rate of speed that defied the laws of gravity, and into a canyon so utterly steep that it defied gravity too. I grew up next to the San Gabriel Mountains, and yes, the mountains are steep, but yeesh. This was to establish our star as a superhero (Dwayne Johnson, aka "The Rock", doing better as a sensitive kind of guy than I would have expected).

Here's a steep canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains, but I don't think "The Rock" could fly a helicopter through it.

After the death-defying rescue, there was a lot of talking for awhile to establish the characters and bits of foreshadowing here and there. Estranged spouses, busy geologists, that kind of thing. I especially liked the poor professor very dramatically presenting the story of the worst earthquakes in history (this part was factually spot on, by the way), and then all his students waking up as the lights come back on in the classroom. One student asks ominously, "could it happen here?". What have they been studying all semester????

I get that a lot, too.

The geologists, who've worked as a team to try and predict earthquakes, predict earthquakes at Hoover Dam, and go there to investigate. Their little harmless quakes escalate quickly into a big quake, and the dam is destroyed. A couple of things: the geologists say there are no faults at Hoover Dam. The picture above is a fault at Hoover Dam. Actually, there are lots of faults at Hoover Dam. It might be more correct to say that faults there are not known to be active. Dams are known to reactivate dormant faults on occasion, due to water pressure along the fractures. Also, there was a variant of the movie trope of the black brother getting killed first. Paul Giamatti was the white guy geologist, and his associate was Asian. We immediately know he's doomed. By the way, Giamatti was pretty much my favorite character in the film. He always said very logical things, like "stop, drop and cover", and kept a cool demeanor all through the film. Oh, and laptop computers report the magnitude of earthquakes while they're still happening. It was then or later in the film that a grad student said something like "it just jumped from a 6.5 to an 8.5", again, right in the middle of the quake. It doesn't exactly happen that way. But I guess I'm being picky. Oh, and no one can predict earthquakes.

Well, almost nobody. These people predict earthquakes all the time (credit: Amanda).

The destruction of Hoover Dam showed the advances of thirty-five years of special effects technology. I liked the destruction of Hoover (or Glen Canyon) Dam in the original "Superman" movie with Christopher Reeves, but in "San Andreas" it was really something to see. I know they couldn't spend time on this kind of thing, but I sure would have liked to hear about the effects downstream on the Colorado River of having an entire year's flow happen in one day. It would have destroyed a string of dams all the way to Mexico, and flooded out of existence a number of towns. But that would have taken up an entire movie, and we had to get back to the destruction about to take place in California. Hoover was almost immediately forgotten.

An approximation of the remainder of the movie "San Andreas", courtesy of Amanda

So, for the rest of the movie, we see Los Angeles get devastated by the worst earthquake in west coast history, a 9.1 or so (no, it can't happen). Geologist realizes that it is only a precursor to a much larger quake in San Francisco, and warns people to get out of town. And go where? Modesto? We have some room in our campus gym, but that's about it. The giant quake hits, the city is largely destroyed, and our characters go about surviving one way or another. Oh yeah, there are characters in the movie. I almost forgot.

So here's the thing. The San Andreas is a transform fault, meaning it shifts sideways during earthquakes. It behaves in a segmented manner, with a history of large, but not gigantic, earthquakes  (in the real world, the quakes top out at about 7.8-8.0 magnitude, about 1/30th the size of a magnitude 9 quake. The northern segment broke in 1906, the famous San Francisco quake at magnitude 7.8 (the movie "San Francisco", 1936, still stands as one of the best earthquake movies ever). The central segment, from Cajon Pass to Parkfield, broke less famously in 1857. The southernmost segment, down in the Palm Springs/Coachella Valley region, has not gone off in about 350 years. It is pretty much the most dangerous stretch of the fault in California. No, there aren't going to be any magnitude 9+ quakes in California. You'll have to look north to the Cascadia Subduction Zone in Washington and Oregon (and far north California) for that kind of thing.

Now I know it was there because the plot progression demanded it, but this will not happen. The San Andreas will slip sideways 10 or 20 feet, but the ground isn't going to open up like this. The plot was slowing down after Ray's helicopter crash-landed in Bakersfield, and the drive to San Francisco was going to take a boring four hours. Something was needed to make them steal an airplane and get there faster. Oh, and the San Andreas fault is a right lateral fault, meaning during the quake, the side of the fault opposite the observer would shift to the right. The photo is showing a left lateral fault. Oh, and they said this was the Central Valley. The San Andreas doesn't go through the Central Valley. Oh, and because the fault motion is primarily lateral, it doesn't disturb the seafloor enough to do this:

In fact, even the world's worst earthquakes don't make tsunamis this big. Nor do they curl in like a surfer wave on the North Shore of Oahu. But heck, by now our heroes are on a boat, so there are some cool dramatic scenes of ships being destroyed. The cargo ship was great (you'll just have to see the movie). Because the plot demanded it, the movie's only "bad" guy was on the bridge when the wave hit, and he looked just like the lawyer in "Jurassic Park" before the lawyer got munched by a T-rex. Only he wasn't on a toilet.

So there are screams, and explosions, and falling buildings. Really, someone needs to sue the architects, because their skyscrapers kept falling down everywhere. This is another point that needs to be addressed. Most modern buildings will not collapse during the "big one". You will just be asking for a world of hurt if you are trying to get out of such buildings during the quake. As the geologists in the movie said, over and over, "stop, drop, and cover". You'll be much better off.

This is the absolute best lesson in the entire movie. Get under cover, preferably with an attractive person. If the building really does collapse, who do you want to spend time with while waiting to be rescued?

Those are my thoughts in the immediate aftermath of the movie, except for one thing. A really big thing, and it isn't geological. Our movie hero is a search and rescue hotshot for Los Angeles. A big earthquake hits, and his first action? He takes a helicopter that is badly needed for rescue operations, and flies off to find his estranged wife. They then take off to San Francisco in what is now clearly a stolen helicopter, in a clear case of dereliction of his sworn duty as a public servant. He crashes the helicopter in Bakersfield and steals a truck, with the justification that he stole it from someone else who had stolen it (that makes it right, right?). He gives the truck to a kindly old couple, making them guilty of receiving stolen property, and steals an airplane. He purposely crashes the plane (well, the airports were destroyed), and then steals a boat. All this to find and "rescue" a daughter who actually has spent the entire movie making incredible good and smart decisions, as well as saving a number of people (more than dad, certainly). So Ray, Dwayne, Rock, or whatever, you should have stayed in LA and saved people. Your daughter was doing fine. That's what made Giamatti, the geologist Hayes, the greatest hero: he had information that could save countless lives, found a way to pass that information on to the people of California, and thus there were still some people left at the end of the movie to rebuild the state (so it can fall over again in a century or two).

But like I said, I rather enjoyed the whole movie, and the special effects were quite good, even if these were things that wouldn't happen in real life. Don't use this movie as your education in the nature of earthquakes. I highly recommend this sort of thing: http://www.earthquakecountry.org/roots/. Or this: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/.