Searching for Treasure

We were flying over a small river and spotted two tired men trudging along the river bed. There were no roads here. It was evening and we were flying home. Though our fuel was low, we wanted to land and ask the men whether they had found anything. From our vantage point above them we could see how far they still had to go until they reached their tent and bonfire.

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Back in Moscow I showed this photograph to Valery Igrevsky, Deputy Minister of Geology, and asked him what the men were prospecting for.

He smiled and said, "Hm ... I can't really say. You've no idea how many teams go out each summer."

As I sat down to write this article I looked about me: there was salt in a salt shaker, a bright gas flame in the kitchen stove, lead in my pencil, bricks that made up the walls of the house, the shiny metal of my transistor radio, an aluminum tea kettle and a ceramic pot that served as a vase. All this takes us back to geology again, to the ores and minerals which have to be discovered.

An early snow was falling. The houses were swathed in white mist. The sound of traffic was muted. But what about those two fellows in Siberia? Had they managed to reach a town, or were they still waiting by their tent for a helicopter to pick them up? There are times when prospectors have a long wait till they are flown out.

"The earth is like a huge treasure chest. Some of the treasure lies around in full view, but so much has to be hunted for," Igrevsky said. There's a map on the wall in the ministry. Its colors resemble a spread of semi-precious stones. Perhaps it most resembles a slice of jasper. Every color and mark stand for discovered treasure. Someone had to be in each spot in order that these pink, blue, emerald-green and raspberry-red designs appear on the map.

"Do you know that there were only seventy (!) trained geologists in all of tsarist Russia and that this map was predominantly white then?"

The Soviet Union now has fifty thousand geologists and half a million men and women make up the prospecting teams. Naturally, not all of them are tramping along a river bed like the two men in the picture. Many work in laboratories with computers and other equipment. Sixty thousand trucks, tractors and cross-country vehicles and a thousand airplanes and helicopters are in the service of the geologists. Still, a man must always be ready to proceed on foot, as these two, or on horseback.

"You want to know how much has been discovered? It's impossible to enumerate everything."

Oil is a good example. At first, there was only Baku. Now, the Volga Region produces seventy per cent of the country's oil. Oil has been found in a thousand other places. Three hundred coal deposits and four hundred deposits of iron ore have been discovered. Prior to the war there was very little cooking gas in the Soviet Union. Now housewives in many parts of the country use nothing but gas. Old Russia had no fertilizers. Soviet geologists discovered them. They found deposits of raw materials for the chemical industry and for atomic energy production. They discovered kimberlite pipes, and the Soviet Union has become an exporter of diamonds, not an importer. Meanwhile, the geologists have moved on to other regions.

"You want to know what we're searching for now. Man's needs keep growing and the prospectors must always be a step ahead of the times."

Today geologists are searching for rare-earth ores. As always, they are prospecting for iron ore and coal. Half the funds in this field are spent on oil and natural gas prospecting. Besides, the number one problem all over the world has suddenly become . . . water. In the arid regions water is needed for raising crops; the industrial regions are forever thirsty. Even where one would think there was an abundant supply of water, man urgently needs the underground waters for drinking, since he has done so much towards contaminating our rivers and lakes.

"Surprises? Indeed, there are surprises." A boulder come upon by chance led to the discovery of apatite deposits in the Khibiny Mountains. There are still greater surprises. The Russian Platform (the regions from the Urals to the Western borders of the USSR) was traditionally considered uninteresting from a geological point of view. Yet, after the war valuable ores were discovered along the Don River near Voronezh, deposits of metal ores have been discovered near Tambov and oil has been found in Byelorussia, near Rechitsa. The first well of the Druzhba (Friendship) Oil Pipeline is located seven kilometers from a railroad, practically beside the Dnieper River. This was a surprise to the most experienced geologists, as were the gold-fields discovered in the sands of Central Asia. However, there were a few stubborn people who, contrary to popular opinion, foretold these discoveries.

"Man has already found whatever lies close to the surface."

Today there is little hope of some Kazakh shepherd or Siberian trapper showing a geologist some "strange rocks" he has come upon. The geologists of today do not spend as much time looking about them as into the depths of the earth. The entire country is being magnetically surveyed from the air. Seismologists "listen" to the earth in predetermined areas and only then do geologists head there in cross-country vehicles, on horseback, but most often on foot, like the two men on the photograph. Two geologists walking across the land.