Reading the Rocks: A Tribute to the Geologists of Pakistan

Every formation name, every age, every line on a geological map is the work of a person who walked the ground and puzzled it out. This site rests on more than a century and a half of such labour — by Pakistani geologists and by foreign colleagues who gave their careers to these mountains. This is a tribute to that tradition, and to some of the many who built it.

Standing on their shoulders

A dataset of formations can make the rock record look like settled fact. It is not. It is the accumulated judgement of generations of field geologists, palaeontologists and mappers, revised and argued over across more than a hundred and fifty years. What follows cannot be a complete roll of honour — the real list runs to hundreds of names — but it tries to acknowledge the kinds of work, and some of the people, without whom none of this would exist.

The first surveyors

Systematic geology in the region began under the old Geological Survey of India in the nineteenth century, and its officers left a foundation still in use. A.B. Wynne (1837–1906) mapped the Salt Range and in 1878 wrote The Geology of the Salt-Range in the Punjab (Memoirs of the Geological Survey of India, vol. 14) — the first great memoir on what remains Pakistan’s classic locality, naming units, such as the Purple Sandstone, that are still used. William T. Blanford (1832–1905) carried the early surveys west, producing The Geology of Western Sind (1880) and co-writing the standard Manual of the Geology of India (with H.B. Medlicott, 1879).

The fossils came under equally careful eyes. The German palaeontologist Wilhelm Waagen (1841–1900), in his monumental Salt-Range Fossils (Palaeontologia Indica), described the rich Permian fauna of the Productus Limestone in detail that anchored the age of those beds for a century, and Fritz Noetling (1857–1928) worked the same Permian–Triassic succession and the Tertiary of Balochistan. Between them they turned a remote range into one of the best-described stratigraphic columns in Asia.

The Salt Range and E.R. Gee

No single locality drew more sustained attention than the Salt Range, and few gave it more than the British geologist Edward Rowland Gee (1901–1988; appointed OBE in 1960). Working across the end of the colonial survey and the early years of Pakistan, Gee mapped the range in detail — his sheets were later distilled into the 1:250,000 geological map of the Salt Range published in 1987 — and stood at the centre of the long argument over the age of the Salt Range Formation. Gee held, on stratigraphic grounds, that the salt lay beneath the Cambrian and was therefore very ancient, against the palaeobotanist Birbal Sahni’s reading of microfossils as Eocene. The modern consensus, which treats the salt as “Eocambrian” (latest Precambrian to earliest Cambrian), broadly vindicates Gee’s stratigraphy.

Among the towering figures of subcontinental geology was D.N. Wadia (1883–1969; elected FRS in 1957). Joining the Geological Survey of India in 1921, he worked out the structure of the northwest Himalaya — Kashmir, Jammu, Poonch and the Nanga Parbat region, terrain now partly in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir — and was the first to describe its great structural syntaxis, the sharp knee-bend of the ranges. His textbook Geology of India (first edition 1919) taught the subject for generations.

Reading the northern mountains

The high north — Chitral, the Karakoram, Kohistan — demanded a different kind of geologist, part mountaineer. The Italian explorer and geologist Ardito Desio (1897–2001), who led the 1954 expedition that made the first ascent of K2, was also a pioneer of Karakoram geology. A tradition of Italian fieldwork in the ranges followed: the modern stratigraphy and biostratigraphy of Chitral and the Karakoram owe a great deal to Maurizio Gaetani (1940–2017) of the University of Milan and colleagues, whose 1:100,000 mapping of the Central-Western Karakoram and whose Palaeozoic–Mesozoic biostratigraphy are cited throughout this dataset.

The single insight that made sense of the collision zone came largely from Pakistani geologists at the University of Peshawar. R.A.K. Tahirkheli (d. 2014), with M. Qasim Jan (b. 1944) and co-workers, mapped Kohistan and recognised it as a fossil island arc — a slice of ocean crust welded between the colliding plates — publishing the first geological map of Kohistan in 1979. Their work, and that of foreign structural geologists such as Patrick Le Fort of the CNRS and Michael Searle of Oxford (whose Colliding Continents, 2013, tells the story) who mapped the Himalaya and Karakoram in the decades that followed, turned the ranges from a puzzle into a legible cross-section through a continental collision.

The fossil hunters

Pakistan’s fossils have drawn palaeontologists from around the world. Guy Ellcock Pilgrim (1875–1943, FRS) of the Geological Survey of India did double duty: he monographed the Siwalik vertebrate faunas and worked out much of the Tertiary marine stratigraphy of Sindh and Balochistan — defining the Nari and Gaj successions and leading the Bugti Hills campaigns that yielded the first remains of the giant Paraceratherium.

Much later, a long collaboration on the Potwar Plateau between the Geological Survey of Pakistan and researchers from Harvard and Yale — David Pilbeam, John Barry, Lawrence Flynn, Everett Lindsay and the palaeomagnetist Neil Opdyke (1933–2019), working with R.A.K. Tahirkheli and S.M.I. Shah of the GSP — tied dense fossil collections to the magnetic-reversal record to build one of the best-dated fossil-mammal sequences on Earth, and recovered the Sivapithecus skull (catalogued GSP 15000) that placed the Potwar at the centre of debates about ape origins.

The Eocene whales were equally joint achievements. Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan named Pakicetus (with S.M.I. Shah of the GSP) and later the swimming whale Rodhocetus (with the GSP’s S.M. Raza, Muhammad Arif and M. Anwar), while Hans Thewissen described the walking whale Ambulocetus (with S. Taseer Hussain and Muhammad Arif). The Pakistani collectors and Survey scientists who found and guided this work were co-authors, not footnotes.

Compiling the national record

Independence in 1947 brought the founding of the Geological Survey of Pakistan, headquartered at Quetta and built at first by the small group of geologists who opted for the new country — E.R. Gee among those who expanded it. Their long task was to gather a scattered colonial literature into a coherent national record. Successive geologists built the lexicons and memoirs that remain the backbone of the field: the first national Stratigraphy of Pakistan compiled by S.M. Ibrahim Shah (GSP Memoir 12, 1977), the Mesozoic and ammonite work of A.N. Fatmi, and — the direct baseline for this dataset — the updated Stratigraphy of Pakistan (GSP Memoir 24, 2017) compiled by M.S. Malkani and Z. Mahmood, which gathers formation names, ages and localities province by province.

Two reference works are opened so often they deserve special mention: Kazmi and Jan’s Geology and Tectonics of Pakistan (1997) and Kazmi and Abbasi’s Stratigraphy and Historical Geology of Pakistan (2008), which together give the modern field its shape and are drawn on repeatedly across this site.

The institutions and the next generation

Behind the names stand institutions: the Geological Survey of Pakistan; the geology and earth-science departments of the universities of Peshawar, the Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, Azad Jammu & Kashmir and others; the National Centre of Excellence in Geology at Peshawar; and the petroleum geologists whose subsurface work quietly tests and extends the surface maps. Their students and staff continue the labour — remapping, re-dating, correcting old errors and filling old gaps, one field season at a time.

An unfinished debt

Stratigraphy is never finished, and neither is the list of those owed thanks for it. This project is, in the end, a way of gathering their scattered work into one place so it can be browsed, searched and learned from more easily. If it is useful, the credit belongs to the geologists — named and unnamed, Pakistani and foreign, in the university and in the field — who read the rocks first.

Corrections and additions are warmly welcome; this appreciation is inevitably partial, and no slight is intended by any omission. If a name belongs here that we have missed, please tell us.