Stumbled on a dig report from 1925 comparing stratigraphy methods

The guy just used a trowel and his eyes to read soil layers while everyone today relies on half a dozen machines, and his site maps from memory were more accurate than my GPS surveyed ones, anyone else feel like we lost something with all this tech?

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derek_dixon783mo ago

You ever notice how the old timers could read dirt like a book? Buddy of mine used to work with this crusty old geologist who retired in the 90s. The guy showed up to a job site once with nothing but a hand lens and a notebook, looked at the exposed cut for maybe five minutes, and drew a cross section that matched the borehole data to within a couple feet. My friend spent three hours with a GPS and a total station that day trying to get a similar profile, and it still came out sloppy. Makes you wonder if all these gadgets just give us an excuse to stop paying attention to what's right in front of us.

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knight.xena3mo ago

Honestly @derek_dixon78 that story hits hard. Ngl I've seen it happen too many times to count. Those guys had eyes that really saw things, you know? We traded that for gadgets that let us zone out. Tbh it's like we let the tech do the thinking for us now.

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