Geophysics is essential to understanding the solid Earth, particularly on a global scale. Modern ideas of the structure and evolution of continents and oceans, or of the formation of mountain chains on land and below the oceans, for instance, are based extensively on discoveries made using geophysics. But geophysics can contribute to geological knowledge on all scales, from the global, through the medium-scale such as regional mapping or the search for oil and minerals, down to the small-scale, such as civil engineering, archaeology, and groundwater pollution, as well as detailed geological mapping.
Geophysics differs from other methods for studying the Earth because it can ‘look into the Earth’, for its measurements are mostly made remotely from the target, usually at the surface. It is able to do this because it measures differences in the physical properties of the subsurface rocks or structures, which are revealed by their effects at the surface, such as the magnetic field of some rocks. But it describes the subsurface in physical terms – density, electrical resistivity, magnetism, and so on, not in terms of compositions, minerals, grain-sizes, and so on, which are familiar to the geologist. Because geologists are often unfamiliar with physics (and the associated mathematics), there is a tendency either to ignore geophysics or to accept what a geophysicist says without understanding the qualifications.
This last is simply to treat the geophysicist as some sort of a magician.
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