In this episode, Mark Priddle, P.Geo., shares insights from his career in environmental geoscience, reflecting on both the challenges and highlights along the way. He offers practical advice for students and discusses how geoscience is perceived in society today, from environmental responsibility to professional practice. Listen now: You can also listen to our podcast on these platforms: Amazon Music Apple Podcasts Spotify Read along with the podcast transcript: Introduction Hello, everyone. Welcome to Beneath Your Feet, a geoscience podcast. I’m Veronica Klassen, science communicator, geology enthusiast and your host. Here at the APGO Education Foundation, our mission is to spark curiosity and passion for the geology of Ontario. Whether you’re a geology nerd, science enthusiast, or nature lover, this podcast is for you. Join us as we geek out over fascinating geology, uncover the hidden storiesand secrets of our extraordinary planet and explore the captivating world beneath your feet. Veronica Klassen Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Beneath Your Feet. Today, I’m going to be interviewing Mark Priddle, who is a senior environmental geoscientist with a consulting firm in Ottawa, as well as a part time farmer and full time grandpa, thanks so much for joining me today, Mark. Mark Priddle Oh, I’m looking forward to it. Thank you. Veronica All right. So let’s just jump right in. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself? Who are you and what do you do? Mark Yes, I’m an environmental geoscientist and I’ve been practicing in the field for over 40 years. Right now, I’m working about three days per week for a multinational engineering firm. But over the past 40 years, I’ve worked for two different federal government departments here in Ottawa and three different consulting firms. And those ranged in number of personnel from about 20 to now 22,000. Veronica Wow.  Mark My focus in work these days is on hydrogeology. So water from the rocks, looking at water supply. Again, a good portion of the world’s population relies on groundwater as opposed to surface water.  Also, dewatering. There’s a lot of construction projects, many, many construction projects require water to be pumped out of the ground to enable the construction and also water quality issues. In addition, I work a lot in contaminated site assessment and cleanup with lots of historical contaminated sites, even some fairly modern day ones. And work on that to help improve the environments and redevelop properties and so forth. And I have a few interesting multi-disciplinary projects related to abandoned mine sites, as well as green energy, and that includes solar farms and battery energy storage. So that’s sort of what I’m up to these days. Veronica Okay. That’s a lot of different things. So what exactly does a day in the life look like for you? What are you doing both when you’re in the office or when you’re out in the field or working on different projects? What does that look like? Mark Yeah. So I’m really blessed to work in a quite a wide variety of scenarios in my day to day job. I do spend about half my time in front of a computer and that involves analyzing data, writing reports, corresponding, keeping in touch with my colleagues, clients, regulators and so forth. But I still get out to do work in the field for environmental side assessments, testing soil and groundwater and other other things in the field. Also, I spend a fair bit of time with clients, regulators, public meetings to discuss projects, answer questions, plan various projects. So I do have a great variety and I think that’s one of the things that I really like about my profession. And geoscience in general, you get sort of all three aspects: sitting in the office using your mind, in the field doing physical things, and also testing your mind as well as interacting with the public and colleagues and, and regulators. Veronica Yeah, yeah. That’s what I love about geoscience. I feel like you can really kind of choose your own adventure a little bit depending on what you’re most interested in. If you want to spend more time in the office, you can absolutely find a job that’s like entirely office work. If you want to spend more time in the field, like there’s lots of opportunities for that too. And so yeah, it’s kind of cool that way.  But I’m curious how you ended up where you are. How did you originally become interested in geology or geoscience? Mark So, so I took a little bit of a roundabout way. In high school I enjoyed and was successful in chemistry. So I headed off to university to study chemistry. But my first work term, just after four months of school, with the federal government in a groundwater contamination group at Environment Canada. And during that time I worked with some really good seasoned geoscientists and sort of things proceeded from there. I worked for a few years as a chemist or a geochemist before getting a master’s degree in groundwater studies. And then it’s been pretty much strictly environmental geoscience since that time. So a little bit of a roundabout way. I always did like the Earth and things related to the Earth, so that’s how I ended up in geoscience. Veronica Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, I find that’s the case with a lot of people that I talk to as well, that yeah, it’s isn’t always exactly clear. Like when you were a kid, did you kind of think you wanted to be a chemist or a geochemist? Mark So I definitely like the sciences. I wasn’t sure what it was going to be and not strongly interested in rocks. I didn’t ever have a rock collection until I was kinda working in my consulting job. Veronica Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, that’s quite cool, because I feel like a lot of people assume that, like, if you don’t like a super