Geologists from Planet Earth

Geology and self-reliance: figuring stuff out in Afghanistan - Emily King

• Julie Hollis

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This episode introduces the Emily, who quite literally found love (and some really interesting rocks) while running a Pentagon-backed mineral exploration program in Afghanistan. Prepare for "free-range geologists" navigating perilous terrain in body armor, battling bubbling lithium lakes in repurposed dune buggies, and the logistical chaos of getting radioactive samples into the Pentagon. It's a love story, a post-war story, and a thrilling, hilarious testament to the unexpected adventures of geologists. 

Teaching resources (questions prompts) for 12-16 year olds can be found here: https://www.tes.com/resource-detail/resource-13276404

Julie:

What do you know about geology? What does a geologist do? And who are these people who are so interested in rocks? In this podcast, I ask geologists from around the world to tell the stories that mean the most to them. And, well, it turns out they're not who you might expect. The remarkable things they've done... the experiences they've had and the passion that every one of them feels for the planet that we live on. But it's not about what I think. You decide for yourself. My name is Julie Hollis and you're listening to Geologists from Planet Earth.

Emily:

Hi, I'm Emily and I'm a geologist. Hi Emily, welcome. Thanks so much for having me.

Julie:

It's a pleasure. What would you like to tell us about?

Emily:

My key story of how I started professionally with geology is a love story. I met my husband running a mineral exploration program in Afghanistan.

Julie:

How did that come about?

Emily:

I was running a program, I had really just started it for the U.S. Pentagon, the U.S. Department of Defense, as a civilian working with industry geologists as well as the U.S. Geological Survey to validate work that had been done by Afghan and Soviet geologists in the 1970s. The goal of the program was to attract foreign direct investment into Afghanistan's mining sector, give the Afghan government and the Afghan people basically a way to generate taxes and create jobs and investment. Because mining in Afghanistan was and still is one of the few industries that can completely change the economy of the country. It's something that has the scale at which you can uplift an entire population, if done responsibly and, you know, in the right way from an economic and environmental perspective. As part of that, what we did is digitalise the legacy data from the 70s, in some cases single paper copies of reports that very brave Afghan geologists kept safe during the first regime from the Taliban because they would burn documents, burn books, or destroy them. So they brought these documents back and they needed to be digitised and put into GIS.

Julie:

GIS stands for Geographic Information System, which means a computer system that displays the location of data, like in Google Maps, for example.

Emily:

And then we put together teams to go out in the field and really go and resample where the geologists had been in the 70s in order to build confidence in that data and then help put some of those locations out for investment to the international mining community. So it was a wonderful program in that we were working side by side with the Afghan Geological Survey and their geologists in the field. And my husband, Mark, is a former Army Special Operations. He was assigned to work with me and the team to help arrange all of the operations for that. So here's this poor guy assigned to a team of crazy geologists wanting to go out hiking the mountains of Afghanistan looking for gold and copper and rare earths. And he's got to convince the U.S. Special Operations command individuals to support this mission. That was his job. And therefore, you know, kind of arrange all the operations and logistics and security.

Julie:

Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about your experience over there.

Emily:

Yeah. Afghanistan is a wonderful country with a lot of amazing people. And certainly from a geologist perspective, it's relatively small. explored. There's been work over decades that's been done, but because of the conflict that's really been endemic, it really has huge, massive deposits that had never been brought into development, right? World-class deposits. And frankly, there aren't a ton of trees, so it's really easy to see a lot of it from the air. So it makes it really cool as a geologist to fly around and literally be able to see what you can anticipate when you get on the ground. So a lot of the work that we did was bringing in new technology and new thinking because back in the 70s, for the most part, Soviet geologists still did not subscribe to plate tectonics.

Julie:

Plate tectonics is a model that describes most of our modern understanding of the Earth, that the uppermost layer of the Earth is made up of a number of large pieces called tectonic plates that move around incredibly slowly, about the same speed that your fingernails grow, but that are ultimately responsible for producing earthquakes and volcanoes and for forming the major landforms on Earth, the Himalayas, the volcanic chain around the Pacific Ocean and deep sea trenches.

Emily:

So the data was oftentimes very accurate, but the interpretation of the data oftentimes needed to be reworked based off of more modern understanding.

Julie:

I see. So Mark was having to deal with a whole bunch of geologists you mentioned.

Emily:

Yeah.

Julie:

So how did that go?

Emily:

Yeah, I like to jokingly refer to all of us as free-range geologists. you know, geologists, we essentially go out and what Mark would say is y'all are on an Easter egg hunt. You're just out there. It doesn't look logical, I think, right? From other people who don't understand kind of the process and the science and the geologists on the team would always try to work with the folks that are providing security or logistics support to explain what we were trying to do. But we were also working in pretty extreme circumstances and that most of these locations you would helicopter in and you would have have maximum, maybe like six to eight hours of time on target. So you would plan these sampling efforts for months, knowing you've got a few hours on the ground to get as many samples as you can, do as much work as you can. And then Mark would be like, okay, well, but if the security goes bad, or the weather goes bad, or something happens, that's fine. This is what you're going to do in eight hours. What are you going to do if we only have four hours? All the geologists, their brains get scrambled when have to rework you know the sampling plan and who's doing what okay and what if something happens after two hours like what do you do then so we would have these plans about what we would execute even if we only had 15 minutes which in a few of the locations we worked that is what happened not everyone was able to get off of the helicopters and there was a security issue on the ground and we had a Norwegian military geologist as part of our team for a few minutes so he was the only one that could go out and take samples because the risk level had gone up so So yeah, Mark had quite an adventure trying to wrangle all of these free range geologists. And of course, a lot of folks get drawn to the field because you go out into the middle of nowhere, and you kind of wander around and look at things on your own, right? So it was challenging. We all learned a lot about how the military does planning, and they certainly learned a lot about, as they would sometimes joke and call us, rock lickers, like what rock lickers like to do. We did several missions, as we would call them, down to a rare earth carbonatite called conition in southern Helmand province.

Julie:

A carbonatite is an unusual type of volcano that can have high concentrations of rare earth elements, metals that are used in most batteries and magnets.

Emily:

It was very challenging terrain, right? It's literally an extinct volcano, right? With kind of the top lopped off. And we had done as much planning as we could with imagery because, again, of the restrictions of having to land somewhere safe enough to land from an aviation perspective, but close enough to where we needed a sample that we could hike in and get the samples and hike out. And we all get on the helicopters and, you know, we fly down to this really remote location and it really looks like something out of Star Wars. And they put us down in the wrong place. Oh, no. So we land and, or, you know, from their perspective, they landed where they needed to from an aviation safety and efficiency perspective. But we get off the helicopter And we're all kind of looking around. You know, this doesn't look like what it looked like on the imagery. And everyone's on their GPS units trying to figure out where are we. And when we kind of figured out where we were, when we started moving in that direction, and we're going with a bunch of marine special operations guys. So, you know, we're moving out. And then we get to like where we're headed into the old volcano to start going up in the area. And there's like, there's a canyon that, you know, nobody saw on the imagery because we were looking at a totally different landing site. zone, right? Nobody had looked over there. So it created this huge diversion. And of course, keep in mind, you're doing all of this wearing full body armor and helmets. And certainly our MARSOC and colleagues and Mark, they're doing it carrying a whole lot of extra gear, right? Weapons, as well as health and safety equipment, all that kind of stuff. So we're going through this massive hike. And one of the senior geologists on my team, he was hiking so fast. But I was like, hey, you've got to stay back within the perimeter. You can't go out past the Marines. But by the way, how are you hiking so much faster? Because this gentleman was in his mid-60s. These are young, 20-something-year-old Marines, and you're outpacing them. You get in there, you've got a lot more gear. He's like, yeah, well, my body armor just was really heavy, so I took the plates out so I could hike faster. Oh, no.

Julie:

Yeah.

Emily:

And he's like, but don't worry, I only took out the back plate. That's not going to help us if you get shot in the back. So the mission was successful. Everybody came home safe and sound and we got some wonderful samples and we were able to validate the rare earths and the uranium that were located at the area. A lot of work went on to be published about these missions, but that's just a typical free range geologist. I'll be able to hike faster and get the samples faster if I just take the plates out of my body armor.

Julie:

Yeah.

Emily:

That mission was so fascinating from a geologic perspective because you're hiking into the volcano, essentially, right? And you're hiking through these different types of rocks. And the poor Marines, they're hearing us talk about what we're going through. And one of the geologists had essentially a Geiger counter because we were looking for radioactive rocks, right? I mean, that's one of the signatures of getting to the right location. The poor guys were so paranoid. They all thought like, Natural uranium is going to harm their fertility in the long run. But then those same rock samples, you know, the way that we had to get samples out of Afghanistan at the time was on military air transport. So we'd have to ship them back to the US in big containers on military transport. And the most effective way to do that was to have them shipped to the U.S. Geological Survey headquarters in Reston, Virginia. You know, they'd come into a military base somewhere around D.C. and they'd go out to the USGS and then they would get it to the appropriate lab. While I was back in D.C., at the Pentagon one day in our office. And I got a call from the loading dock and they said, there's a delivery here for you. I'm like, what? Like, you know, what kind of delivery? They said, it's a bunch of big black packages. They said that it just came in from such and such base. I said, oh, that must be the rock samples. They were supposed to go straight to USGS. They said, well, they dropped them off. Can you come pick them up? Like they're out here at the loading dock in the parking lot. I said, okay, well, I'll come get them. So I, you know, I got a cart and And I went out and I'm looking at these boxes of rocks and I'm thinking, wait, these are from conition and they're radioactive, right? There's uranium in these containers. And I'm thinking to myself, wow. What's going to happen when I try to bring them into the Pentagon? What am I supposed to do with them? So I load them on the cart and I go into the security checkpoint. And there's this really funny thing when you work for the DOD or the US government in general, where anything that the government brings in, like equipment of any kind, has to go on something called a property book so that you can maintain tracking of everything, whether it's a chair or a desk or computer or anything like that, right? It goes in a property book associated with your office. And so I bring in these big boxes of rocks to the security department and they're like, what are you doing? I said, These are rock samples from Afghanistan. I told them what they were. And he said, why are you bringing them in here? And I explained what had happened with the shipping. And I said, what do I need to do for me to bring them to the office? And he said, well, just put them through the security scanners, the x-ray machines. I said, okay. They're like, is it what's in there? I'm like, it's literally just bags of rocks. You're going to see bags of rocks inside the box. And of course, we wanted to keep them sealed if we could to maintain the chain of custody. And so we Picked them up and the guys helped me put them on the x-ray scanners and they go through and they load them on the cart. And I said, is there anything else that I need to do? They said, no, just make sure to put them on your property book. Okay, I'll put the rock samples on the property book. Is there nothing else? They said, nope. And I'm pushing the cart through the Pentagon, fully expecting some kind of sensor somewhere to go off. And I brought it all the way up to the office where my boss was a deputy undersecretary of defense. And I said, Mr. Brinkley, I just want to let you know, we've got some radioactive rock samples in the office for a day or so until I can get them out to rest. And he's like, please. get them out of here as quickly as possible.

Julie:

You referred at the start to this being a love story.

Emily:

Yeah, I think, you know, having met Mark in Afghanistan, running this program, our falling in love and getting engaged and getting married was all interwoven with running this program. You know, as we were In working on military bases and working in a military and DOD construct, we were very quiet about the fact that we were dating because, of course, you're deployed overseas. You're with people who are away from their spouses or their loved ones. You don't want to make it overt that you're there with your boyfriend. So we kept it really quiet until we got engaged. And then we planned our wedding from Afghanistan. We were doing all of that mostly remote. And I was in Afghanistan for about 50% of the time on average. And we had an interesting thing happen where as we got closer to our wedding, we were planning to bring foreign investors or mining companies into Afghanistan to encourage them to bid on the tendering of four early stage copper and gold assets. So we had 40 international mining and exploration companies that had submitted expressions of interest for these areas. And we were going to bring in, I think it was around 19 that ended up coming into Afghanistan and we were going to have to take them out to site. So at the same time that we were planning a wedding together, we were planning this massive operation together. And my husband in particular, but a lot of military folks love a whiteboard, right? And everything has to be planned on a whiteboard. And Mark always had the saying in our office in Afghanistan, if it's not on the whiteboard, It's not going to happen, right? Like you do these group planning exercises, you put it on the whiteboard, and then it's like the official plan. And so we're a few weeks out from our wedding and this massive operation, and we're having a planning discussion. And Mark says, well, you know, if we get bad weather during this window, we're going to have to push the mission two weeks to the right. I said, well, Mark, we can't push the mission two weeks to the right. We're getting married then. And he looked at me dead in the eye in front of the whole team and said, It's not on the whiteboard. It went on that day. You know, I got it off my flight board. So we completed the mission on time. So we did this massive operation. And then we went home and got married a week later. One of the other places that we sampled was on the border between Afghanistan and Iran. There are several dry lakes that were highly prospective for lithium brines.

Julie:

Brine is really salty water that is common underground under dry desert lakes.

Emily:

which frankly, like back in this time, kind of like 2009 to 2013, people weren't yet aware in general about the demand that was coming for lithium. Same with rare earths, you know, looking at a rare earth deposit. Now I feel like everybody's talking about battery metals and critical minerals, but at this time, Nobody knew what the heck you were talking about. And so we were trying to evaluate these dry lake beds for lithium brines. But again, they were in a very sensitive area, very close to the border with Iran. You know, dry lakes aren't always super dry, right? Depending on the weather. And they can be really complicated places to sample. It's almost like a layer cake. You know, you're drilling through these hard salt pans that occur at different levels and the brines are kind of captured between those hard salt layers. So in order to sample the brines, you really have to drill. It's not something that you can really sample at the surface. We had to figure out a way to drill into these lake beds. But we went through the same exercise of, OK, if we have eight hours, what do we do? Six hours, four hours, two hours, 15 minutes. And we had vibrocore drills. A

Julie:

A vibrocore drill is a handheld mechanical drill that uses vibration to help drill through wet sediment.

Emily:

And we had to buy like dune buggies in Afghanistan. So Mark had to get these little kind of Chinese made dune buggies repurposed for us to be able to haul this very light drilling equipment. across giant lake beds in Afghanistan. So the pictures are hilarious because it looks like we're at like a go-kart track. You know, these little blue dune buggies that I'm driving on and off of helicopters, big Chinook helicopters, big military helicopters, pulling basically like a medical sled packed with drilling pipe and kind of backpack portable drill equipment. Because again, the lake beds are not And in one case, a helicopter landed and kind of punched through the top, right? So you can't fully put like full equipment on these lake bed surfaces. And we did have a Marine Special Operations ATV that went, you know, same thing, like went through the surface and got stuck. So you had to kind of work with very different equipment to get out there. So at one point, we had the VibraCore drill, which again, are very light, but you couldn't get through the salt pan. So we had to like stick DrillCore pipes on either end of the handle and have all these big marines like hanging off of it, trying to push through. It's just the pictures are hilarious. And then one of them, it poked into a layer, you know, got through the salt. But for whatever reason, that layer was much more liquid than the others, and it started to fill back up. So all of a sudden, the surface of the lake that we're standing on this salt lake starts to rise up in this big bubble right because the liquid was pushing it up and so we're like okay but we're not where we need to be to get the sample yet so let's try to keep drilling one by one the marines would go off the side and at the end it was like you know just keeping the lightest person on the drill which happened to be me still trying to get this drilled finally like pulled it out and then of course it collapsed and subsided, but thankfully everybody was fine. But all driven to get that get that one last sample out before we had to go. So I think that's when people are asking, what's it like to be a geologist? I'm like, well, there might be a lot of commonality and experiences and techniques, but there are also a lot of projects and places in the world where you have to get incredibly creative.

Julie:

Yeah

Emily:

Because in most locations, you're somewhere remote where if you don't plan for every contingency, which nobody can, you're going to have to come up with some way to make it happen.

Julie:

And you took these in investors out successfully. Can you say anything about what came of it in the end?

Emily:

Yeah, at the conclusion of that investment promotion program, which we did in partnership with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, of course, right, like the Afghan government was really the ones putting these out for investment and evaluating the bids. But at the conclusion of that, there were four winners and four reserve bidders announced for those projects. So it was for early stage copper and gold assets that needed exploration done. At the end of that program, the Afghan government had four companies, all British, Emirati American partnerships with Afghan companies in most cases to begin work. For a variety of reasons the Afghan government did not get those contracts through to fruition. But up until the Taliban took back over a few years ago, there were several companies actively at work on those deposits. And in fact, at one of them, they are still there and actively working on a project in Herat. So from an exploration perspective, they were considered really successful.

Julie:

And personally, it worked out pretty well for you too.

Emily:

Yeah, absolutely. Still married.

Julie:

Emily is the founder of Prospector, an Thank you very much. My name's Julie Hollis, and you've been listening to Geologists from Planet Earth.