The case for a greenfields renaissance Feature - Geological Society ...

The book consists of 21 chapters, and makes use
of Mike Morton’s journals, letters and the writings
of his contemporaries. Black and white photos are
distributed throughout the book, as are period
black and white maps of the areas described. Mike
Morton was also a respectable cartoonist and
some of his cartoons, as well as some of his field
sketches, are also reproduced. The end of the book
hosts an epilogue, several appendices, abbreviations
and a number of colour photographs.
At the end of the book I came away with an
impression of a man who had accomplished an
incredible amount under often incredibly adverse
conditions. Sandstorms, searing heat, scorpion
bites, sniper fire from tribesmen, malaria, stomach
upsets from camel-dung-infested water and
numerous other impediments to the task at hand
all seem to have been taken in the stride of the
geologist in those days. In addition, tours of duty
were often weeks to months in duration and
based from tents.
The account gave me a fresh appreciation of what
it was like to be a geologist in the field in a
foreign country in the mid-twentieth century. It
gave rise to some pretty cynical thoughts about
many of the geologists that have profited from
technology and the minerals booms in recent
decades. The conditions endured by the geologists
in the book would not have been tolerated by
many of the current generation who demand high
salaries for week on/week off rosters based in
well-equipped camps.
Despite the wealth of anecdotes, the amount of
cultural information, and the background history
of oil exploration in the Middle East, the book is
not easily readable. Text regularly flips back and
forth between information garnered from research
and sentences and paragraphs extracted from
Mike Morton’s diaries. This serves to detract from
a free-flowing narrative. The result is a disjointed
biography that is further complicated by an
abundance of local names that readers unfamiliar
with the area will struggle to keep track of.
In summary, the book is a thorough documentation
of the life of a remarkable man. It captures
important events in the Middle East that directed
the progress of oil exploration in the region.
However, unless the reader is familiar with the
region they will struggle to read the volume from
start to end.
BRETT DAVIS
Consolidated Minerals
Deformation of the
continental crust: the
legacy of Mike Coward
AC Ries, RWH Butler and RH Graham (Eds)
Geological Society Special Publication 272
595 pages
This is a well-published book, hard cover, good
quality paper, several of the 29 papers (chapters)
sporting colour plates, with its subject matter
sourced widely across the globe, wherever Mike
Coward’s influence extended.
The papers were chosen to build on Coward’s
legacy and follow, approximately chronologically,
the research themes that Coward developed
through his life. The lead editor of the book is his
wife of more than 25 years and fellow company
director, Alison Ries.
The editors started off with a warm and personal
tribute to Mike Coward (1945–2003), a largerthan-life
character whose career extended from
HH Read Professor of Geology at Imperial College,
London, to running a consulting company. In
between he worked in and explored South
America, Africa, Europe, central Asia and, briefly
early in his career, Australia. Mike was introduced
to structural geology by John Ramsay. He loved
field work and learned early the value of combining
seismic interpretation with geological observations,
which was unusual for a geologist of his time. His
forte was understanding medium-to-large-scale
structural geology, and scaling up the field observations
to crustal-scale geological evolution.
It would not be possible to sit down to read this
book cover to cover. It starts in the outer
Hebrides, where Coward did the field work for
his PhD, followed by two useful review papers or
academic chapters on shear zones then back up to
the Moine Thrust of western Scotland for another
two papers. Then the world tour begins in
Southern Calabria in the Appenines, across to the
Himalaya in Pakistan and then Northern Oman,
where the subducted Arabian continental margin
has conveniently been exhumed (further from
Australia but perhaps easier to access than the
Papuan Peninsula). These papers all look at various
models to explain the observed, highly-complex
deformation and the role Coward played in laying
the framework for their interpretations. This
theme continues in the Greek Cyclades and
Zambia before turning to a long study of tectonic
processes in south–east Turkey. The extensivelystudied,
extremely-arcuate orogenic belt that
forms the Carpathian Mountains is discussed in
the next chapter followed by two papers on the
South American Andes, the first with a focus on
Colombia, the second looking at deformation of
the whole Andean chain.
Coward’s involvement in the petroleum and mineral
industries is celebrated with papers dealing
with salt tectonics in Brazil and the North Sea,
and then a seemingly ‘out of place’ paper on basin
inversion using laboratory models. Blind thrusts
are invoked from the seismicity of the Zagros
fold–thrust belt to elucidate the structure of this
complex but important area for oil and gas production,
one of the surprisingly few mentions in
this volume of the role of earthquakes in the
deformation cycle.
A global review of hydrocarbon prospectivity in
fold and thrust belts is preceded by a short chapter
on inversion tectonics in Tuscany, which pays
tribute to the pioneering work of Coward in this
field. Hydrocarbon prospectivity in Colombia using
kinematic simulation modelling is the topic of the
next chapter.
The last five chapters contain some of the more
interesting chapters for this reviewer, particularly
Sibson’s paper on Au–quartz mineralisation in the
continental crust. He mentions case studies of the
Victorian gold fields though neither Victoria nor
Australia was mentioned in the index. This paper
highlights how useful it would be to be able to
determine the base of the seismogenic zone more
accurately than we can in Australia at the
moment with such a sparse seismograph network.
Chapters on the nature of fracture swarms in the
chalk of south–east England and development of
the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa are followed
by two papers on fault reactivation in
Africa and the Western US to complete the volume.
These chapters should be read by anyone
who still believes that Australian earthquakes
should only have thrust mechanisms or that the
principal stress direction should be horizontal
throughout the Australian crust.
There is a lot of interesting material in this book
on stress, strain and crustal deformation. What
holds it all together is the strong sense of
Coward’s involvement in all of the places
mentioned and in the evolution of ideas that
developed to explain the observations, as complex
as they are. The audience is wider than just
Coward’s former students and co-workers, and
would include anyone actively working in any of
the worldwide prospective mineral and petroleum
fold and thrust belts mentioned. It would have
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