I also have spent quite awhile as an exploration geophysicist. I miss it! I work purely with satellite data now, which is decidedly less tangible.

I've done a fair bit in the field, but a huge part of my career has been mining old datasets and reinterpreting things in light of new data/etc.

What the article is describing isn't new in any way. But it also doesn't remove the need for fieldwork or the need for the experience of having done fieldwork to use existing datasets. Observational sciences (e.g. geology, biology, etc) where you can't easily replicate the environment you are studying in the lab are always going to hinge on some sort of fieldwork.

Finding creative ways to use existing data doesn't change that.