Unless there will be a dramatic shift to the left within the next 5-15 years, we'll see the breakdown of society and ecology as we know them

Geology is a multidisciplinary area of science. You can look at the history of organisms, or the processes of rock series, but geology tries to tie them altogether. There are many big names in the history of geology as a science, but it is still humorously regarded as one of the youngest sciences. Quite literally, continental plate drift only became widely accepted as recently as the second half of the twentieth century. James Hutton, Alfred Wegener, Inge Lehmann, Georges Cuvier, Marie Tharp and Nicholas Steno are notable as geologists, but there are contributors from all sorts of fields, such as those who worked on lenses, or polarizing filters, or instruments that can read radiological isotope ratios in samples, or the father and son team that worked out Bragg diffraction techniques, or people with great insight such as Charles Darwin. If someone was involved in natural philosophy, odds are good they were interested in geology anyhow. Not to say that their ideas were never refined, such as Hutton's view of uniformitarianism, or gradual change of the planet. However, the notion that "the present is the key to the past" remains a fundamental concept of geology as a way to understand a country as foreign as the past. The present, after all, is all we have at our disposal. A trained geologist can look at an exposed outcrop, and read out a whole set of interrelated stories from the sequences of events revealed. In individual strata, one can see something of the type of environment that created it. One might be able to see where a well-sorted river sandbar gave way to an equally well-sorted pond as the river moved, or where a former seabed eventually became a piedmont. Energy levels or sortition processes in those environments are kinda easy to see, and making such determinations about a rock is fairly empirical. However, we get into the realm of hypothesizing about a transition of surface environments when we start inferring a narrative between two facies. We can see what's there, but it's often harder to see what is missing, or the little unconformities. What separates a geologist from a rock collector is that the geologist is much more interested in formation in which the sample was found, and in how they can draw connections between it and its host or parent material. In any case, nothing I've mentioned would be omitted from an introductory geology survey course or text. Those will cover ideas such as different kinds of timelines, such as biostratigraphy, or lithostratigraphy, and then split hairs over the different methods of measuring those units, and how they can be gradually merged or disambiguated through analytical methods.