{"id":785,"date":"2026-07-22T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/2026\/07\/22\/why-do-fictional-geologists-keep-getting-killed-off-in-movies\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T17:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T17:00:00","slug":"why-do-fictional-geologists-keep-getting-killed-off-in-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/2026\/07\/22\/why-do-fictional-geologists-keep-getting-killed-off-in-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do fictional geologists keep getting killed off in movies?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Josie Ford<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Feedback<\/a><\/strong> is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more<\/em><\/p>\n

Stony ground<\/h2>\n

When you start watching a film, there are some characters you can confidently predict will die. A minor character joining two major characters for an action sequence? Dead to illustrate the stakes. Wise old mentor in an epic fantasy? Sure to die at the end of act two.<\/p>\n

Feedback knows these cliches and more, but it hadn\u2019t previously occurred to us to consider geologists as being at risk. Nevertheless, it turns out they have a life expectancy only marginally better than characters played by Sean Bean.<\/p>\n

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We learned this from a delightful analysis in Geology Today<\/em><\/a>. Geologist Erik Sturkell at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and his colleagues have amused themselves over the past decade or so by compiling examples of geologists in films: who are they, how are they portrayed and what tends to happen to them?<\/p>\n

Sturkell\u2019s team has now documented \u201c141 movies, spanning the period 1919\u20132023 and starring 202 geologists\u201d. It turns out geologists mostly appear in films centred on adventure, drama, action and science fiction. \u201cGeologist movies are rarely comedic,\u201d write the researchers. Only 11 per cent of movie geologists are female, though this has apparently picked up a bit since the 1990s. Furthermore, cinematic geologists are, if not consistently heroic, \u201cat least not guilty of any professional misconduct\u201d.<\/p>\n

And yet they are frequently rubbed out. \u201cGeologists die at an alarming rate in the movies, often very early on,\u201d the authors write. Depending on the decade, the death rate varies between 31.6 and 35.7 per cent. Of the 202 geologists, 69 die, 30 by murder. The authors cite the 1967 film The Money Jungle<\/em>, which Feedback hasn\u2019t seen, but which involves multiple oil companies scheming for control of a rich field. During this unseemly squabble, five geologists are murdered, mostly by creative means, \u201csuch as being electrocuted by a golf cart, poisoned when taking medicine, gassed by the fireplace and killed when his toy train explodes\u201d. This, the authors note, is \u201cthe worst serial slaughter of geologists in any movie\u201d.<\/p>\n

Across the years, a further 12 geologists died of \u201cwork related\u201d causes, such as \u201cbeing hit by a volcanic bomb, falling into a crater or an opening fault, drowning in quicksand or lahar, and incineration in an oil pit\u201d. Equally common are deaths involving extraterrestrials, such as the geologist in Prometheus<\/em> who is assimilated by aliens and \u201cconsequently killed by former colleagues\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is all fascinating, but Feedback finds ourselves consumed by follow-up questions. What are the cinematic death rates for other branches of science? We can\u2019t help but suspect that palaeontologists must be absolutely getting it in the neck, because they only show up in stories where extinct creatures come back to life and start eating people. On the other hand, movie solid-state physicists are probably having a pretty chill time.<\/p>\n

Can anyone point us to a dataset?<\/p>\n

Me, me, me<\/h2>\n

Feedback is alarmed to learn that the lyrics of pop music have become significantly more self-centred over the past few decades.<\/p>\n

This is true in the US and Germany, according to a study in PLoS One<\/em>, which looked at the 10 most popular songs<\/a> each year from 1970 to 2019. The analysis revealed an increase in the use of first-person singular words like \u201cI\u201d, \u201cme\u201d and \u201cmine\u201d, compared with first-person plural words like \u201cwe\u201d and \u201cours\u201d. Curiously, this didn\u2019t occur in Japan and Hong Kong, which the study describes as \u201cmore collectivist\u201d.<\/p>\n

The paper treats this in near-apocalyptic terms, noting that \u201ccontemporary societies are increasingly self-focused, as reflected in levels of greed, narcissism, and social disconnection\u201d.<\/p>\n

Feedback certainly isn\u2019t going to mount a \u201cgreed is good\u201d defence, but we do have questions. For starters, how much of the trend is driven by the highly entrepreneurial US, as opposed to the more moderately capitalistic Germany? Second, how much of the increase in \u201cme\u201d words can be explained by the rise of solo artists and the total collapse of bands? Do K-pop groups \u2013 at this point basically the only remaining successful bands \u2013 also exhibit this egotistical trend?<\/p>\n

She\u2019ll be back<\/h2>\n

Last month, New Scientist<\/em> reviewed the book We Are Not Machines: The fight for the future of work<\/em>, which argues that artificial intelligence is not exactly coming for our jobs, but rather that our jobs are being contorted to fit AI (20 June<\/a>). The result is that jobs that were once interesting are becoming boring and companies\u2019 products and services are getting worse.<\/p>\n

Readers Ian Williams and Erik Foxcroft both got in touch to flag the spooky near-coincidence that the book\u2019s author, a journalist at the Financial Times<\/em>, is named Sarah O\u2019Connor. \u201cO, how close to perfection,\u201d says Erik.<\/p>\n

Having a name that is almost but not quite that of the lead human character in The Terminator<\/em> has previously caused ripples. In 2015, O\u2019Connor was the FT<\/em>\u2018s employment correspondent and tweeted<\/a>: \u201cA robot has killed a worker in a VW plant in Germany.\u201d The combination of seeming cyborg-murderer news and O\u2019Connor\u2019s name went viral. The irony was that she had never seen the film and didn\u2019t get the reference<\/a>. Feedback assumes she has since watched it, and hopes she concluded her book with a three-word promise of a sequel.<\/p>\n

Got a story for Feedback?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com<\/a>. Please include your home address. This week\u2019s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Josie Ford Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more Stony ground When you start watching a film, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[312],"class_list":["post-785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-new-scientist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bkbc.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}