Triassic-Mesozoic Field Trip, Saudi Arabia

I know, I know, it's been two weeks since I last posted something! I've got good excuses, really I do.

Last week I went on a field trip to look at Triassic and Jurassic rocks in central Saudi Arabia. More than 70% of the world's booked hydrocarbon reserves are in carbonates...and most of that is in Jurassic shallow marine platform carbonates in Saudi Arabia.

Geologic map of the Arabian Plate. The colors correspond to the age of the rocks exposed at the surface.

Because the Arabian Plate tilted a bit to the east when the Red Sea opened between it and Africa around 40 million years ago, give or take 5 million years, nearly the entire succession of rocks from Neoproterozoic basement to Paleocene is exposed in a series of bathtub rings that get younger and younger as you go east.

This particular field trip is designed around exposures of the very proximal (more landward) parts of the Triassic and Jurassic reservoirs that contain so much oil and gas here in Saudi Arabia.

We stayed in the Sheraton in Riyadh and drove out to the various outcrops and road cuts in a series of very long day trips (we were often out for 10 to 12 hours, which are unusually long days for a show and tell sort of trip like this).

This was my first trip to Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia (the administrative capital that is, since Mekkah is the religious capital). I'm sure glad I traveled there on Aramco's dime. It was just as dirty and half-constructed as Khobar, only much, much larger. So there's no need to go back!

I learned some really amazing things on this trip. For example, there is "local Saudi beef" sold in the markets but you never see cows grazing. What would they graze on that the sheep and camels hadn't already eaten? So where does this "local beef" come from? It turns out that cows are indeed raised in Saudi Arabia...in underground farms, stacked level upon level. They never go outside. They only see artificial light. They shit and piss on the next level down. Basically all of the "local beef" is veal since the cows never really move. Thank god I only bought imported beef from Brazil but this story has turned me off beef in a big way.

Then we learned that there is a small "high quality" cement plant outside Riyadh. Nearby is a significantly larger "low quality" cement plant. It seems the demand for "high quality" cement just isn't there. This explains a lot...every building that you see under construction is made of cinder blocks that look like they have been stacked together by children: blocks pointed every which way (hole side in, out, to the side), irregular spacing, gaps plugged by rags, newspaper, rubble. Low quality cement will do just fine when that is the general standard of construction.

The lunches were provided each day and for the most part were reasonable. However, the logistics coordinator decided to do a Saudi lunch one day. He showed up with bags of canned tuna, canned olives, peanut butter, honey...and canned cream, canned cheese, and white bread. The Saudis apparently love them some canned cheese. Grab a piece of it with a hunk of white bread, dip it in the canned cream and then honey...yikes! The four westerners on the trip (including me) were pretty appalled by this discovery--the amount of chemicals required to stabilize "cream" and "cheese" in cans is appalling. We stuck to peanut butter. At least we weren't going to starve.

There were three women on this trip, two westerners (me and a Brit) and a fairly westernized Saudi woman. So you might be wondering about bathroom facilities. There are truck stops in Saudi Arabia and they usually have a women's facility. And the mosque in small towns often has a small female prayer room and toilet (except in Mekkah, women are either discouraged or actively prevented from going into mosques in Saudi Arabia). Most of these places were not very clean (the one on the first day was downright appalling) so I tried to pee at our field stops as often as I could. Thank god for hand sanitizer and personal packets of Kleenex.

The fact that women were permitted on this trip is a bit unusual. Government Affairs turned down female applicants for this trip for all of 2010 and 2011, then suddenly relented (actually, our logistics team probably found the right guy to bribe). I knew that I had to go because the opportunity could be pulled away with no warning or explanation.

I'm still working on captions for a Picasa album of my field trip photos. But I'll stick in a few here to give you the basic idea.

Looking at the Triassic Jilh Formation (the dark brown stuff in the hill to the left and the stuff we are standing on). Here in central Saudi Arabia, it is composed of fluvial (river) clastics. In the subsurface, the Jilh is a restricted, hypersaline, lagoonal carbonate.

This is some middle Jurassic carbonate that I can't identify from the photo. Field notes are not at hand.

There is a sword on the Saudi flag, and swords figure heavily in religious and civil government iconography. Islam, the religion of peace. I took this from a moving car and that's all I'm going to say about it.

Some crappy middle Jurassic carbonate that has absolutely no resemblance to its reservoir equivalent to the east. The faint trails are made by camels. Saudi Arabia is lousy with camels, which are free range for the most part. Oddly, I have no photos of them although we saw plenty of them every day.

A suspension bridge over a very large wadi to the east of Riyadh. One of my few attempts at "art."

Dalh Hith. The only known exposure of the Hith anhydrite, an extremely important regional seal for the Jurassic hydrocarbons. Anhydrite is an evaporitic mineral and quickly dissolves when exposed to water. Even though it doesn't rain much here, it rains enough to dissolve most of the Hith exposures. Most of what you see in this photo is the earliest Cretaceous Sudair carbonate; the Hith anhydrite is that darkish material at the base of the cliff.

We were looking at Late Cretaceous Aruma braided fluvial clastics in this quarry exposure when suddenly this Bedouin showed up with his two donkeys (the dark one was the offspring of the white one), his flock of sheep, and three dogs which appeared to be just hanging out with the group. They had absolutely no function in moving the sheep. The Bedouin moved the sheep by throwing rocks at them and waving a staff around.

Geological Field Work in Saudi Arabia in June

Everyone that went on the Neoproterozoic field trip has agreed that we now have some serious bragging rights--doing field work in Saudi Arabia in June is not for the faint of heart. It was 44C by noon every day. We left the hotel 5am but were chased back by 2pm. It was simply too hot to move, much less think by that time of day.

Because geological field trips are all about thinking. And looking. And talking. And arguing. As I am fond of saying, get a group of 10 geologists together and you'll end up with 12 explanations for something. And none or all of them may be right. Being able to create and defend multiple, even mutually exclusive, hypotheses is a skill unique to geologists that many other natural scientists don't share.

We spent almost 45 minutes at this one outcrop in town discussing whether the middle, darker bed was fluvial or eolian.

I've got several posts planned around all of the things we saw and did. After all, I managed to take more than 300 photos in about four days. This post is about the big picture.

Where did we go? We went to look at outcrops within the Arabian Shield, the mass of metasediments that forms the core of the Arabian Plate. Somewhat younger sediments are preserved within and on top of the shield and it was those sediments that we were studying. These sediments were deposited in the Neoproterozoic and earliest Cambrian...before there was any life more complicated than algae. One of the classic lines spoken on this trip was by Kent, one of Aramco's top sedimentologists: "Hmm, no plants, no animals. I am not sure how to deal with these rocks"! Biological processes have a profound effect on geological processes. That was made abundantly clear on this trip as we studied thousands of feet of sediment untouched and unaltered by biology.

Medinah is the second holiest city in the Islamic religion. More on that in another post. The flight across KSA only took about two hours. The dark rocks along the west coast are the Arabian Shield.

We flew from Dammam to Medinah, then got on a bus and drove five hours north to the town of Al Ula. Al Ula is an extremely old settlement located in a fault-controlled wadi in the shield. It has been occupied for centuries because there are reliable sources of water there. I took this next picture of Al Ula from an overlook with a bunch of cell phone towers. As an aside, we were in MOFN for most of this trip...and had cell phone reception for nearly all of it. I get better cell reception in KSA than in the US.

Looking south along the wadi, the town of Al Ula is stretched out below us. We can see clastics of the Saq Formation to the east on the other side.

Here is another picture showing Al Ula, the location of our hotel, and some of our field stops.

As you might expect, the landscape is quite surreal. The topography is very young, perhaps 25 million years or less, so it is rough and jagged. There are few plants than can survive out there and the ones that do scratch out a living are mostly brown. There is little green to relieve the eye.

Near the middle of the Robutain Formation looking south. Channels in the modern alluvial fans are picked out by the light colored grasses that grow in them. Those are sand dunes in the middle distance.

The first thing you do when you arrive at a field stop is get out and look at the big picture. And of course take lots of pictures. And start talking about what you see.

Our group was small, only 10 people total including Paul and Dominique, the trip leaders. We also had two young Saudi geologists with us.

Once you get the lay of the land, it is time to look at the rocks in more detail. That requires hiking. Sometimes you get nice easy outcrops like the one in town in the earlier photo. On this trip, that was an exception. Most of our outcrop work involved serious scrambling up steep slopes with lots of loose material.

Everyone in our group was fit and more or less prepared for the rigors of the trip. It was pretty hard to get ahead of them once we were on the outcrop so I could take pictures.

Here we are examining the contact between Muraykah unit 1 and the underlying Badayi volcanic formation. That day we proceeded to climb a couple of thousand feet up a really rough slope, mostly scree, to examine the entire Muraykah formation.

I took this picture from near the top of the Muraykah jebel looking southwest.

See that grungy whitish slope below? We climbed up that. We started on the valley floor. I certainly put my knee brace through its paces on this trip!

Field geology is an awkward activity. The best outcrops, the rarely seen but critical contacts, are usually in some nearly inaccessible spot.

The group is making its way to the contact between Muraykah unit 2 and the overlying lower Kurayshah. The contact is angular and unconformable. One of the guys is already standing on it, silhouetted on the slope.

I toss this last photo in for my Utah friends. Look familiar? The weathering pattern of these sandstones is very similar to that in Bryce and Zion although these rocks are about 400 million years older and not eolian in origin. Still, you take well cemented sandstones, break them up with some big joints and fractures, uplift and expose them in an arid environment, and voila! Easy! Same but different!


It was an interesting trip and I hope that besides learning more about KSA geology, I managed to make some new friends.

Through the Looking Glass

It is definitely strange here. And I mean strange beyond the usual thrashing around associated with moving to a new place.

Anytime you move to a new place you have to learn your new phone number and new address. That's not a big problem for most of us. But I've also got a new mail box and combination, office phone, loaner cell phone (more on this in the Strange section below), badge number...I have to be ready to whip out any and all of these numbers for just about any transaction.

The compound is tightly clustered in some places, sprawled out in others. I'm learning to navigate unfamiliar streets with unfamiliar names either on foot, in a taxi, in a bus, or in a friend's car. That's a tough transition for a North American used to learning a new place by car!

have gotten a bunch of administrative and personal settling-in tasks done in just these four short days. The weekend is coming up (Thursday and Friday are the weekend in KSA) and a new friend and I (a geologist I met in orientation) are planning to make a grand shopping expedition into Al Khobar tomorrow.

Besides this geologist friend, I see other people from my orientation here and there in camp. Plus I keep getting introduced to new people who, when they see me around, introduce me to whomever they might be with at the time. And everyone is unrelentingly friendly and helpful.

This leads me to tell you about the two most important things I'm learning that are key to making this work: ask questions of everyone you meet (where to buy a TV, a couch, a mixing bowl, how to get cash, where to catch the bus, on and on)--and I do mean everyone because it is amazing how much some of these folks know--and remain patient.

The whole concept of inshallah (god willing) makes me twitchy because I am by no means a believer in the predetermination of the outcome of things such as the date and time my Ebox might be delivered. But the Saudis are in large part quite fatalistic about everything large and small. Pitching a hissy fit won't get you very far in KSA.

So now to the strange bits.

Quite a few Saudi men wear thobes to work--along with dress socks and shoes (that alone is pretty comical). If a man wears a thobe, he is often wearing a red and white checked scarf. There is apparently something like gang symbolism in the way a man folds the kaffiyeh. Some of them are elaborately twisted and folded and tossed over the shoulder--attention to detail that is strangely feminine. An equally large number of Saudi women veil from top of head to toe with only their eyes visible. So you see these flapping white and black human-sized sails everywhere. I even see women in abbayahs and head scarves on the running track around the golf course--running. In their abbayah. In 85degree temps. This wiki article has some good photos.

I take the dogs out in the morning and evening for long walks around that same golf course. By a fluke, I am nearly always out there when the calls to prayer start (around 4:30am and 7pm or so). Most mosques just play prerecorded tapes over loudspeakers. Very loud speakers. There are at least half a dozen mosques within hearing distance and the calls weave into this weird, echoing, dissonant chant. Since I am out before sunrise and after sunset, it is kind of eerie.

I can't buy a scooter or car or mobile phone until I get my iqama or work permit. Well, that's not quite true. I can buy a cell phone but I can't buy the SIM card that makes it work!

Stores are usually closed from 11am to 2 or 3 in the afternoon for noon prayers, a long lunch, and presumably a nap. You have to schedule your shopping excursions around prayers because shops close and kick your infidel butt out onto the street. Most prayer times last about 25 minutes but that could be quite an inconvenience during, say, August. During orientation, I was thoughtfully given a daily prayer schedule for 2009 in the form a little foldout wallet card. But that sort of information is available online too.

Life in the compound is a series of rules and silly administrative hoops. To get home internet, I had to get my Aramco login, go to a special site and set up a home internet password that was different from my Aramco password, then go to another site and request a second phone line. That will be installed Saturday (first day of the workweek). After that is done, I can go to yet another site and request DSL service. Then I wait. Inshallah, I'll get home internet sometime in 2009.

I'm sure I'll return to the Strange theme in future posts but I'll close this one with screen shots of my Outlook calendar showing both regular and hijrah dates (in which it is the year 1430) and my blogspot login screen.

We Have Arrived!

The dogs and I arrived safely Friday night. I only have internet access at work so may not be able to post much for a while until I can get home internet set up. Like everything here in KSA, getting home internet set up is a rather involved process (large bureaucracies result in plenty of jobs for the relatively unskilled Saudi workforce).

The weekend here is Thursday and Friday so I will be out of touch until we return to work on Saturday.

I made a mistake in my earlier Fun Facts post. There are 5,000 residences in Dhahran camp and between 12,000-15,000 people live here. I'm sure Aramco knows exactly how many people are here but they aren't telling.

The dogs are settling in, sort of. They are not dealing with the long days in the house (townhouse sort of affair). I got tired of cleaning up pee everywhere so today Mimi got left in her crate. At least the mess will be localized.

Fun Facts!

The political system in Saudi Arabia is a monarchy and thus it is actually the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. You often see this abbreviated KSA. Expats who are traveling are said in slang to be "out of Kingdom" or OOK.

Saudi Arabia has no natural, permanent rivers, streams, or lakes.

A person who works in a country other than the one in which they are a citizen is called an expat (expatriate). It is not a pejorative term and has nothing to do with any sort of jingoistic patriotism or lack thereof to one's mother- or fatherland.

Dhahran is the compound established in 1938 for non-Saudi employees of Saudi Aramco. It is a small city these days with western lifestyles and customs (the 2004 population was more then 97,000). Many Saudis live on the compound now (in the beginning it was restricted to non-Saudis only) but they do so with the understanding that people will dress and behave in a western style that would not necessarily be acceptable outside the compound. These Saudi families have generally lived in the U.S. or Europe.

Aramco is now wholly owned by the Saudi government but it began as a consortiuum of American petroleum companies. For a really excellent history of Aramco, I recommend "Oil, God, and Gold." It can be a bit dry in places but contains a lot of amazing detail and is worth slogging through.

Dhahran is about 10 miles from the shore of the Persian Gulf at a latitude of 26 degrees north. It is in a time zone that is GMT +3 hours. It does not follow daylight savings time. So now, in the fall, Dhahran is 7 hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast. In the spring, it will be 6 hours ahead.

Despite being positioned at the same latitude as Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the weather patterns in Dhahran are quite different. This site summarizes the temperatures and precipitation amounts in pretty charts. But in short, Dhahran is hot and humid although the humidity can fluctuate rapidly on a daily basis.

In part because Mecca and Jiddah are located in KSA, it is the most conservative and strict Muslim country in the world. The inexorable influx of satellite and other wireless communications has made it nearly impossible for the religious police to restrict and censor as much as they did in the past. Still, there are few Saudis who will openly challenge any aspect of the current political/religious/cultural system (they are one and the same).

I am a guest of the Kingdom and as such, I have signed documents stating that I will obey their laws and customs. However, as a westerner, I am not required to cover my body, face, or hair. I must dress modestly when off the compound, wearing pants or skirts below the knee and shirts that cover the elbows. I've been told that the religious police can get testy and tell western women they need to wear an abbayah over their clothes or a scarf on their head. One is never to argue with them. Some younger women choose to wear an abbayah off compound but I gather that older women find this new trend somewhat horrific.

Alcohol is not allowed on the compound or anywhere in the country. However, the island nation of Bahrein, a short 20-mile trip from Dhahran, is more than happy to sell alcohol to dissolute westerners and misbehaving Muslims. For example, there is a wine club in Dhahran that meets weekly in Bahrein.

Saudi Arabia does not issue tourist visas.

Arabic text is read from right to left. However, the numbers printed on their currency flow from left to right. I can't get a good explanation for this. The exchange rate hovers around US 1 to SR 3.3. The unit of currency is the riyal.

There are significant restrictions on what customs will allow in. Before you decide to ship me something, check with me first. Dhahran is served by both FedEx and DHL. Some mail order companies who have European branches and European-based companies can ship directly to the compound.

Travel Visas!

Everything started telescoping pretty quickly last week. I got my travel visa to Saudi Arabia, a very big hurdle cleared. The movers showed up last Friday and packed all of the things I decided I could just not live without. It took them all of three hours! All but one large box of items will be sent by boat and will show up about 3 months after I do. I chose the things for the E box, sent by plane and arriving a couple of weeks after me, very carefully: my Mac, some dog bedding, some key technical books, that sort of thing.

A few days earlier, I finished packing the suitcases that will fly with me--all FIVE of them. One contains a bag of dog food. All of them are overweight. But paying those extra bag and overweight bag fees will still be cheaper than shipping those items. And it ensures that I'll have plenty of clothes, meds, and other key items right away.

The biggest hurdle cleared last week was the final approval of the dogs' travel documents. This one sentence sounds so simple but the process was, well, simply insane. Timing was horribly tight. None of the docs can be more than 30 days old but as you continue to read, the series of steps required could easily take longer than that if there was any sort of snafu along the way.

I first had to get new rabies shots for both dogs. They weren't due but they had to have those shots within six months of their travel to KSA. Then I had to get a letter from my vet, addressed to Customs in KSA, stating each dog was either a watch dog, hunting dog, or seeing eye dog (Harry and Mimi are now officially watch dogs). Then those got sent to US Department of Agriculture along with Form 7001, the standard export form for dogs. I sent those docs FedEx with a prepaid return FedEx envelope enclosed.

When those came back in just a couple of days with a fancy USDA seal on Form 7001 and the vet letter, I then had to get authentication from the Texas Secretary of State. But this fine office cannot authenticate federal documents, which is what Form 7001 is (federal trumps state in this case). So I had to make copies of each set of docs, attach a short letter stating those were copies of the originals (included in the same package), have that letter notarized, then send all of that to the Texas Secretary of State. But when I called, I found out that that fine office would take up to 10 business days to authenticate then return them. So I bought a round-trip ticket on Southwest from Dallas to Austin for the next day, called the pet sitter to let the pups out a couple of times, and flew to Austin, borrowed a friend's car, drove downtown, and had the materials (really, just the notarized letter) authenticated in about 10 minutes. This produced a new page with a shiny gold seal attached to each set of documents, now numbering 8 pages for each dog.

The next step was to send everything to Washington to the US Department of State for authentication by the US Secretary of State. Yes, that would be Secretary Hillary Clinton. They told me they would keep the documents for five days. I FedEx'ed everything to them along with yet another prepaid return FedEx envelope. Annoyingly, the Columbus Day holiday fell in the middle of this but at last the documents showed up with a super duper fancy page added to each set. Gold seal, embossed stamp, Clinton's signature, the whole shooting match. All that for only $8 per set!

Whew! The last step was to send everything to the Saudi Consulate in Houston for final approval. I sent everything by FedEx with yet another prepaid return FedEx envelope.

After sending those off, I slipped back into major stress mode. What if I had failed to jump through all of the necessary hoops? What if I didn't do things in the right order or had made a mistake in the documents? What would I do if the Saudis didn't approve the documents?

But good news at last--there is a spiffy stamp (like a postage stamp) and some Arabic text along with an official looking signature.

The biggest hurdle of all is yet to come. That is of course actually making the trip itself. But more on that later!