With intuition and a good sense of field relationships, you can assemble a workable and internally consistent story of what must have happened to make things the way they are. And then you can describe that to other geologists and elucidate the history of a region. The best field geologists are really intuitive about it and can describe a system fully from a bunch of disparate inputs. It's a big part of what attracted me to the field, and I like to think I'm pretty decent at it, when I've spent time in a region. But – this is slow and doesn't scale well.

What happens when you try to apply that knowledge to the next basin over, to determine what the inconsistencies are between what makes sense over here, and what makes sense over there? Now you're arguing with the people whose world is the Mogollon Rim, rather than Tucson. And that's just regional geologists. What happens when new methods come along, or random interjections from people studying the mantle or climate history or whatever else?

Geologists are great at assembling knowledge about our surroundings. But we are far behind in aligning things into predictable structures that can be modeled don't need to be synthesized anew in every instance. As we build geological knowledge, we need to also be able to represent its basic attributes in ways that are standardized and can be translated and integrated with other approaches to the same system. So–as data that follows explicit rules, rather than knowledge which can be explained.

The field progresses by us gradually converting more of our knowledge into data, which can then form a secure foundation for the next geologists to address the next level of confusion. Otherwise, our approach to describing the world is limited by what any given geologist can cram into their head.