GSA is essentially divided into two halves: surface processes and geophysics. Surface processes includes oceanography, sedimentology and palaeontology while geophysics does what it says on the tin – plate tectonics, earthquakes and all that kind of stuff. All in all it’s a fairly mixed group of subjects, some of which have very little to do with each other. One result of this is that there’s something for everything: chemists will enjoy the oceanography, biologists the palaeontology and physicists the geophysics and, if you take GSA without GSB, it will have some relevance to almost every other Part 1B course. The flip side is that, unless you are a very keen geologist, there will probably be parts of the course that you don’t particularly enjoy.