EXPOSED
Lecture prep, syllabus writing, problem-set generation, grading, and literature summaries for intro geology/meteorology/oceanography courses are already substantially automatable, and enrollment pressure in small earth-science departments is a bigger near-term threat than AI itself. What holds is the embodied and relational core: running field camps and research cruises, teaching students to read outcrops and calibrate instruments, supervising labs, and advising graduate researchers who need a human to vouch for their work. No licensure protects the role, so the moat is field instruction, funded research, and mentorship rather than credentialing.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. A 12 sits above the desk-bound humanities lecturer because half your teaching load is irreducible — taking students to a road cut and making them argue about the contact, calibrating a sonde on a cruise, troubleshooting a mass spec — but the intro-course machinery of writing lectures on plate tectonics, generating problem sets on geostrophic balance, and grading multiple-choice exams for 200-seat GEOL 101 is now largely machine work, which keeps it out of the 14+ band.
Some physical or field component. Field camp in the Wasatch, a two-week berth on a UNOLS vessel, and hands-on rock saw and thin-section lab supervision put you well past screen-only, but the reason this is 12 and not 17 is that the majority of contact hours in most academic years happen in a lecture hall and an office, with the uncontrolled-environment work concentrated in a summer session or one field methods course.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no license to teach oceanography — no state board, no PE stamp, no equivalent of the Professional Geologist registration that consulting geologists in states like Texas actually need — so the 3 reflects only that field trips and shipboard work carry institutional safety duties and small-boat or research-diver certifications that a non-human cannot hold.
The human relationship is the product. 14 is earned on the graduate side: your name on a dissertation committee, the recommendation letter that gets a student a USGS or NOAA postdoc, and the years of co-authorship where students learn your judgment about which data to trust — that relationship is the product, though the anonymous intro-survey lecture that most of your FTE is measured against is what stops this from reaching 17.
Meaningful discretion. Deciding a student's field mapping is publishable, calling off a traverse when weather turns, judging whether an anomalous isotope result is instrumentation or discovery, and setting the ambiguous line between struggling and unqualified in a qualifying exam are all yours to own — 13 rather than 16 because these calls are reviewable by committees, department chairs, and IRB/safety officers rather than being final and unappealable.
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