Rock Doctor: Adventures of a Field Geologist before 9/11

By John Cater

This is the tale of fifteen humorous, heart-breaking years, of the journey of a lifetime, from Tibetan India to the Anti-Lebanon Mountains of Syria.
A tale of oil exploration, with love, humility and the companionship of some of the world’s hardiest nomads discovered along the way. It is the story of some pioneering and sometimes misguided journeys through the amazing world of the Middle East and Indo-Pakistan, before the political upheavals of the 21st Century.
A world where it was still possible to play a drum solo in a Sufi temple, share a goat with Pathan tribesmen, guide a helicopter down on a Turkish threshing ground, eat sheep’s brains at 16,000 feet and crawl though Roman sewers on the abandoned edge of an apocalyptic war.
The crying shame is that nearly all of this story is no longer possible. Above all this is a true story, to remind people of what can be, even if we can never rebuild what was.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800466425

John Cater

Dr. John Edward Cater was graduated from Monash University with a PhD in 2002. He worked in Queen Mary University London as a lecturer from 2004 to 2008, then joined the university of Auckland, as a senior lecturer. His research includes studying a variety of fluid flows and aeroacoustics.

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Rock Doctor

Copyright © 2021 John Cater

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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In memory of Waterman Sergeant Len Cater, Royal Army Service Corps. As brave as any I ever met.

And Connie, his wife, who put aside religion for love.

Contents

Don’t Get Me Started… Oh – Too Late

Chapter 1Before 1985

Chapter 2Central Turkey, 1985

Chapter 3North-West India, 1986

Chapter 4South-East Turkey, 1987

Chapter 5Yemen, 1988

Chapter 6Nepal, 1989–1990

Chapter 7Syria, 1991–1992

Chapter 8Pakistan, 1993–1994

Chapter 9Oman, 1995

Chapter 10Azerbaijan, 1997

Chapter 11Russia, 1998

And Finally…

Don’t Get Me Started…

Oh – Too Late

It’s 1992, just after the First Gulf War. Me and Big Steve, my very good Irish friend, are sitting in a Syrian Army tent. We’re sort of under arrest, on the orders of one of the fifteen kinds of Syrian secret police. Actually, we’re being held on suspicion of spying, but luckily the Syrian squaddies feeding us dusty almonds don’t think we were actually looking for the Scud missiles that we’ve just seen, parked in a massive bunker on the other side of the ridge.

Of course, they don’t know that we know the British Military Attaché, having met him in the best pub in Damascus, the undiplomatically named Pig & Whistle, in the basement of the British Embassy. One beery evening he asked us to look out for Scuds on our travels, and we promised to keep our patriotic eyes open. Luckily we’re too naive and stupid to be worried about the electric shock therapy awaiting us back in town, so everyone’s chatting, relaxed and friendly, while our cameras are taken to Damascus to have the film developed.

All of which probably sounds too bizarre to be true, in this modern world of satnavs and YouTube. There was a lot more left to the imagination back then, so field geologists could be blissfully ignorant of political reality, even when exploring the borders of Lebanon, Yemen or Pakistan. We got by with a few armed guards to keep any bandits at bay and a willingness to meet the locals on equal terms. Which I did for fourteen eventful years, until those planes hit the Twin Towers and brought our simple, carefree world of tolerance crashing down.

This is the story of some pioneering but sometimes misguided journeys through that amazing world. I’m certainly nobody’s idea of an action hero, but I can truthfully say that I played a drum solo in a Sufi temple, shared a goat with Pathan tribesmen whose ancestors had slaughtered mine, guided a helicopter down on a Turkish threshing ground, ate sheep’s brains at sixteen thousand feet, and crawled through Roman sewers with my wife-to-be on the abandoned edge of the First Gulf War. And I’m pretty sure that most people given those opportunities would have done much the same. The crying shame is that nearly all of this is no longer possible. Perhaps my tale might remind people of what can be, even if we can never rebuild what was.

Alison, my first boss and the daughter of a colonel in Britain’s special forces, might not approve of me using some people’s names here. Still, many of them have long since retired or died, and the companies involved have mostly disappeared, so I’m sure my story won’t hurt anyone. Anyway, who’s going to believe it? Well, luckily the secret police did. They took one look at our boring pictures of barren hillsides, notably devoid of Scud missiles, and sent us on our way.

Chapter 1

Before 1985

Hi there. I’m a Rock Doctor. There’s hundreds – maybe thousands – of us, but not many call themselves that. Maybe they’re too modest, too proud, or too boring to bother with that sort of thing. Maybe.

Whatever. The point is, we Rock Doctors all have doctorates in Earth Science. Mine was awarded by a couple of generous professors (one aptly named Friend) in Birmingham in 1984. Having had a careful look at what I’d been up to over the previous four years, they did whatever you do to allow someone to call themselves a Doctor. Which had nothing to do with my medical ability, as we shall see.

My training, if you can call a PhD that, took place largely in the provinces of Alicante and Valencia in south-east Spain in the early ’80s. Most of my time was spent biking around on a series of knackered motorcycles, living in a tent, struggling through gorges choked with thorn bushes, and learning the Valencian ‘Balensiahn’ dialect whilst shopping for Spam and curry powder in the local markets. My only experience of ‘doctoring’ consisted of self-diagnosing and treating heat exhaustion, tummy upsets and the scrapes I picked up either off the road or drinking in bars with gypsies. I learned that rehydration requires water rather than cold beer, and that, whilst I kind of enjoyed risking my neck on a motorbike, or climbing a crumbling scree slope, I wasn’t very good at bar-room brawls. And I fell in love a couple of times, which made the occasional tedium and loneliness worthwhile.

As for earlier education… Well, I went to primary school in northern Kent, a major entry point for a huge diversity of immigrants to the UK in the ’60s. My fellow pupils taught me to accept new cultures, which proved to be a very valuable lesson. My parents unwisely gave me a squeaky plastic hammer before I could walk, so I quickly learned the basics of field geology (hammering rocks) and developed a love of drumming that has lasted through six decades and eleven pub-rock bands so far. A mate of my dad’s gave me a kid’s book on rocks and minerals when I was about six, which set me off on my career. The How and Why Wonder Books I bought with my pocket money were full of the stuff a small boy wants to know about dinosaurs, sabre-toothed cats (not tigers!) and giant sloths. By the time we moved to Cornwall I had a collection of rock fragments (most of which, I later realised, were not the minerals and fossils shown in my books after all), and a fascination for all things ancient.

But I wasn’t really into rocks as such, which even I could see are basically pretty dull (apart from the glittery specimens my big sister’s bearded boyfriend generously donated from his collection of Norwegian ore minerals). My thing was discovering ancient worlds, visualising weird landscapes populated by fantastical creatures, and exploring the mysteries of our planet. Films like One Million Years BC and visits to London’s Natural History Museum fired my imagination, although job-wise I dreamed of being a footballer or a computer expert rather than one of the palaeontologists mentioned in my books. I hadn’t a clue about petroleum until I was at high school in Penzance, where I was assigned an essay on crude oil (smirk!) for Chemistry homework. Later on they gave me a choice between doing O-Level Latin or Geology. The original no-brainer.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to go to one of the few State-funded schools in Britain offering classes in Geology at O, A and S Level, with a teacher who recommended Leicester University because their Geology degree included lots of exciting fieldwork. In my case that meant roughing it alone in a tent on a tiny island in Scotland (Kerrera), wondering what the local rocks were called, and going on guided tours of Arran and the Alps to find out about rain (I wore glasses, so could never see much when it rained, which it seemed to most of the time) and beer. This didn’t do much to equip me for my field geology career, which was spent almost entirely in dry countries (in both senses of the word). I eventually realised that there wasn’t much I could do with a Geology degree other than sit on an oil rig in the North Sea, so I decided to be a student for a bit longer whilst continuing to indulge my love of motorbikes and drumming.

So I applied for that PhD. And the rest is ancient history.

Publications

Cater, J. M. L., 1984. An application of scanning electron microscopy of quartz sand surface textures to the environmental diagnosis of Neogene carbonate sediments, Finestrat Basin, south-east Spain. Sedimentology, 31, pp. 717–31.

Cater, J. M. L., 1987. Sedimentary evidence of the Neogene evolution of SE Spain. Journal of the Geological Society of London, 144, pp. 915–32.

Photo 1.1. 10 million year-old river deposits, including channel-filling sandstones, in a road cut north of Karachi. Note 1.5m stick for scale near the base of the channel. The rock layers (‘beds’) piled up gradually, with the youngest on top (the principle of Superposition). Some layers accumulated more rapidly than others – the channel may have filled with a plug of sand overnight, whereas the thin layers below the channel probably took thousands of years to build up. The once-horizontal package of beds has been tilted gently more recently, as western Pakistan gradually squeezed up against Afghanistan (see Map 2).

Photo 1.2. Ripples formed in sand and mud, deposited on the floor of a shallow sea or lake about 400 million years ago, in SE Turkey. Their shape is typical of ripples that form in standing water today due to wave action, rather than beneath a flowing current. The assumption is that these ancient ripples record wave action, rather than current activity, using the principle of Uniformitarianism – ‘the present is the key to the past’. This assumption underpins most interpretations of Earth history. The dates of past events are often uncertain, but are measured in tens or hundreds of millions of years – an up-to-date time-scale can be seen at https://www.canoncitygeologyclub.com/geologic-time-scale.html

Photo 1.3. 330 million year-old sandstone outcrop near Edinburgh, showing inclined ‘cross-beds’ with a wave-rippled top. This is interpreted to be part of a sand bar that formed at the mouth of a small delta feeding into a large, stagnant lake that covered most of the Midland Valley of Scotland at that time. The Midland Valley (or ‘Central Belt’ of Scotland) was a rift valley at the time, as in present-day East Africa, with Arthur’s Seat forming part of a volcano a bit like Kilimanjaro (see Photo 1.8).

Photo 1.4. Close-up of the straight-crested ripples seen in Photo 1.3. They have steep, closely-spaced crests characteristic of wave ripples. The waves are interpreted to have modified the tops of larger-scale dunes built by strong currents, perhaps river floods flowing across the delta top.

Photo 1.5. Outcrop of ‘pebbly sandstone’ – a pile of pebbles set in a matrix of muddy sand – recording an ancient landslide. Such ‘gravity-flows’ were the main focus of my PhD in Spain. These rock layers have been tilted nearly vertically since they were deposited in a shallow sea, about 70 million years ago in SE Turkey. The pebbles and cobbles were rounded in rivers before the landslide occurred, probably on a steep delta building into the sea. The finest grained sand marks the top of a rock layer, so the sediment at left is younger than that at right. This tells us the ‘way up’ of the beds, vital information for interpreting the geological history of an area.

Photo 1.6. Deep marine channel-fill and deformed bank-collapse deposits in the Pab Range, north of Karachi. Layers that were once horizontal have folded and slumped in a plastic way, before the rocks solidified. This is interpreted to have happened on the unstable edges of an undersea channel, about 70 million years ago. One yellow sandstone layer thickens abruptly to the right, probably in-filling a hollow within the channel. Younger, darker, undisturbed layers can be seen at the top; these contain fossils and burrows recording deep marine conditions.

Photo 1.7. Sands deposited by floods escaping from a river channel, showing distinctive ‘climbing’ ripples that built up as the flood flowed towards the left of this view. These can also form in the deep sea, on the edges of submarine channels.

Photo 1.8. Angular cobbles of 330 million year-old lava scattered within a bed of sandstone made mainly from grains of lava. This probably records volcanic eruptions on the edge of a lake or shallow sea, in a rift-valley that now forms the Midland Valley of Scotland. The angular lava fragments were probably blasted out of an explosive volcano (or ‘tuff-ring’) associated with the Arthur’s Seat volcanic centre.

Photo 1.9. Limestone ‘tufa’ deposited around plant stems in an ancient hot spring in SE Turkey. Hot springs have featured in many of the areas I’ve studied (Spain, Turkey, India, Pakistan and Italy), many being long-lived religious centres. The nicest ones were filled with relaxed people rather than tufaceous limestone.

Photo 1.10. Slab of 330 million year-old rock found on a beach near Edinburgh, showing a pattern of mud-cracks that are interpreted to record drying out of a coastal mud-flat in the sun. There could be other explanations of course, but the simplest one that fits is usually the best bet – following a rather dodgy kind of logic called ‘Occam’s Razor’.

Photo 1.11. A fine example of ‘upper-phase plane-bedding’, showing ‘primary current lineations’ on the surface of a bed of sand deposited by a flood escaping from a channel, seen in the Laki Range, Pakistan. The distinct streaky lines record the current direction. They typically form in shallow water, and are a common sight on flagstone pavements. The line of holes below the hammer was probably made by quarry-men in Victorian times.

Photo 1.12. Meandering burrows formed in late Cretaceous times (about 70 million years ago) in the Laki Range, Pakistan. Very similar burrows (called ‘Scolicia’) are common in marine deposits ranging from about 100 million years old to the present, worldwide. They are thought to be made by burrowing sea-urchins, which can live in deep or shallow seas.

Photo 1.13. Abundant simple burrows, seen in deep-marine turbidite sandstones in the Makran, western Pakistan. The sand was deposited about 15 million years ago on an ancient equivalent of the modern Indus deep-sea fan system, before the Indus river diverted southwards to Karachi.

Photo 1.14. Deep marine Zoophycos burrow systems seen in the Kirthar Range, Pakistan; about 30 million years old.

Photo 1.15. A really rubbish fossil, typical of the sort of thing you have to deal with in the real world instead of beautiful dinosaur and ammonite remains displayed in a museum. This is part of a large marine gastropod (snail) shell found in the Himalayas, in undated rocks thought to be about 200 million years old.

Photo 1.16. Cross sections through large bivalve shells in Permian rocks (about 250 million years old) in NW India. They prove that these sediments were deposited in the sea, although these rocks in the Himalayas are now exposed at over 4,000 metres elevation, to the amazement of early geologists. That was some flood, Noah! The shells were probably deposited at the base of a slope, maybe near a reef.

Photo 1.17. Well preserved bivalve (clam) and brachiopod shells in the Indian Himalayas. These lived in the sea. These species existed for too long to give a precise age for these rocks, but trilobites found nearby suggest that these sediments were deposited about 500 million years ago.

Photo 1.18. Poorly-preserved ammonite-like fossil in the Indian Himalayas. This is a simple, primitive ammonoid, about 400-500 million years old.

Chapter 2

Central Turkey, 1985

I was wearing my bright red and black Man City away shirt, because the boss said it made me easy to spot from the helicopter. Unfortunately it was also acting as a red rag to a bull, or in this case to the two biggest, most ferocious Anatolian Shepherd Dogs I’d ever seen.

Professor Peter Turner and I backed carefully against the trunk of the only tree in miles. I was trying very hard not to give off fear pheromones, in case the slavering hounds got the wrong message and decided to finish us off. These were horse-sized (well, bear-sized anyway), brown and grey, uncuddly beasts. We’d seen a few similar Baskerville-style mastiffs from the car over the past few days. They obviously didn’t see many motor vehicles in this rural backwater of central Turkey, somewhere south of the town of Sivas. I think instinct told them that our bright white four-wheel drive Pajero was some alien species of top predator, and that it was their duty to fling themselves at our wheels, like Rhodesian Ridgebacks trying to trip a lion. This near-suicidal tactic didn’t seem to surprise our Turkish driver, whose only apparent concern was the cost of compensation if we stopped after an impact. But it had convinced me that these dogs were not to be messed with.

One of them started growling, its lips twitching psychotically as drool dripped from its yellow fangs. To my immense relief, its owner arrived before it decided which of my arms to wrench off. But then I stared in horror as the owner – a small shepherd boy with ears nearly as big as his hound’s – just laughed at us and gestured wildly, apparently urging his dogs to tear us to pieces.

Nice doggy! Pete ventured.

I looked out past the shade of the olive tree, across the scorched dry grass of the