Dr. Blackmer, a geoscientist with the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, said in a keynote lecture that individuals use roughly 3,100,000 pounds of Earth materials in a lifetime and that geoscientists provide the data engineers use to design safe foundations and infrastructure.

Why it matters: Geoscience informs decisions affecting public safety, water supply and energy development. Blackmer told listeners that knowing whether subsurface materials are soil or rock and where fractures run is essential to designing foundations, managing groundwater and planning subsurface uses such as energy wells and carbon storage.

Geoscientists collect field and laboratory data that feed maps, well and spring databases, and the cores that help engineers and planners understand what lies beneath the surface. "In order to know what foundation to build you have to know what is underneath it," Blackmer said, noting that subsurface information helps engineers decide whether to design for soil or rock and how to treat fractures.

Blackmer described several practical applications: mapping outcrops and fractures, drilling cores for direct sampling, maintaining a publicly accessible database of wells and springs, and laboratory work such as electron-microscope analyses to identify minerals. She pointed to deep-sea drilling programs (the Joides Resolution) as one method scientists use to read past climate from seafloor sediments and to large core repositories used by researchers and industry.

On energy and the subsurface, Blackmer said Pennsylvania’s subsurface reaches roughly 8,000 to 10,000 feet in many places and has been used historically for coal, oil and gas. She noted emerging uses under study in the state: hydrogen exploration, geothermal energy, and subsurface carbon storage where emptied pore space in reservoir rocks could store injected CO2.

She also stressed the role of geoscientists in water-resource work. Field teams sample springs, record chemistry and physical properties, and add data to public databases so communities and planners can evaluate potential water sources. "We have a database of water wells and springs at the survey that is publicly available," Blackmer said.

The lecture emphasized the variety of geoscience work—from field mapping and core description to GIS and lab analysis—and how those data link to engineering and environmental decisions.

Looking ahead, Blackmer said geoscience will remain central to addressing climate change, material needs, water security and hazard mitigation, and that using past climates and the rock record helps predict future responses.

Less critical detail: Blackmer showed photographs of fieldwork and labs, and described repositories and mapping workflows used by state surveys and research institutions.