SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Afghanistan's Buried Riches
Geologists say newfound deposits in the embattled country could fulfill the world's desire for rare earth and critical minerals and end opium's local stranglehold in the process
By Sarah Simpson | Thursday, September 22, 2011

Desolate hills in southern Afghanistan could harbor enough rare-earth elements to supply the world for years. Image: Moises Saman/Redux Pictures

The scene at first resembles many that play out daily in the war-torn Red Zone of southern Afghanistan: a pair of Black Hawk helicopters descend on a hillside near the country’s southern border with Pakistan. As the choppers land, U.S. marines leap out, assault rifles ready. But then geologists sporting helmets and heavy ceramic vests jump out, too. The researchers are virtually indistinguishable from the soldiers except that they carry rock hammers instead of guns. A human chain of soldiers encircles the scientists as they step forward on the dusty ground.

“The minute you get off, you go into geologist mode,” says Jack H. Medlin, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s activities in Afghanistan. “You forget, basically, that these guys are around—unless you try to get out of the circle.”

Medlin's team has flown many missions, each one limited to an hour so that hostile forces do not have time to organize and descend. Sixty minutes is a stressful, fleeting instant to geologists who would typically take days to carefully sample and map a site. The rocks containing a desirable element—say, gold or neodymium—are invariably sandwiched between less interesting ones, all of which were laid down long ago and since folded, buried and exhumed so that they protrude only here and there, possibly in deeply eroded streambeds or on opposite sides of a steep valley. Following the trail takes expertise, stamina and concentration. The marines know that their protégés pursue the clues like bloodhounds, so the human circle moves with the scientists.

The latest of these gutsy excursions, carried out in February, proved that the missions have been worth the risks. It revealed a superlative cache of rare-earth elements—a coveted subset of so-called critical minerals that have become essential to high-tech manufacturing and yet are in short supply in the U.S. and many nations. The prized deposit is comparable to the premier site mined in China.

Geologists long had hints that Afghanistan was rife with massive, untapped stores of critical minerals worth billions or even trillions of dollars. And political leaders knew that if the volume of minerals was extractable, the wealth might allow Afghanistan’s economy to transition away from its dependence on opium production, making the country more politically stable. But before any mining company will dig in, someone has to figure out whether the deposits hold enough treasure to be worth the cost. That means putting boots to dirt: collecting samples and mapping the rocks in detail.

The USGS has now compiled reams of data from its dangerous forays into regions around the country. After high-level talks with Medlin about the latest information, senior officials at the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of State have become convinced that mineral riches could well help to transform Afghanistan. Indeed, a land rush of sorts has already begun. A major mining company from China has called dibs on a huge copper deposit in a $2.9-billion venture that is now Afghanistan’s largest development project. U.S. interests have invested in gold. And Indian firms are the majority of almost two dozen that are clamoring for iron.

The USGS’s latest assessments of the nation’s mineral bounty were to be made public in a landmark report rolled out in Kabul and at the Afghan embassy in Washington, D.C., at the end of September. But as of August, when this article was being written, Medlin and other USGS scientists had already told me that the concentration and access of Afghanistan’s minerals could make the country one of the most important mining centers on earth. Notably, Afghanistan could become a major supplier of rare earths as China hoards its own. How soon foreign investors will be willing to mine for those elements is unclear, however. The site examined in February lies in the southern part of the country—the most violent region, under the strongest Taliban control. Yet if mining of copper and other metals can take off in the north, that surge could create an enormous commercial and political “gold rush” that could finally help drive out the opium and Taliban strongholds, possibly creating a dramatic shift in U.S. military action and foreign policy and a blow to terrorism.

Such a prospect could never have become a serious possibility if geologists had not made extraordinary efforts to do science in a war zone—a story that has gone largely untold until now. Medlin and 50 other USGS scientists have been exploring Afghanistan for seven years and have gone to great lengths to train the country’s geologists to do the same work on their own. Medlin and others will be back in Kabul in the coming months, helping Afghan scientists to interpret the latest reports and make practical determinations about dozens of new mineral deposits. And plans are afoot to take an even deeper look at the rare-earth find, which they suspect is much larger than the initial estimate suggests.

Rare (Earth) Finds
For decades most assertions about Afghanistan’s mineral worth were guesswork. In 2007 Medlin’s team had identified the 24 most promising mining regions throughout Afghanistan’s arid plains and high mountains, based on painstaking integration of unpublished field reports from the Soviet era and before. But the governments of both the U.S. and Afghanistan basically ignored the information until two years later, when Paul A. Brinkley took notice. A U.S. under secretary of defense who had overseen the Pentagon’s efforts to boost business in Iraq and Afghanistan, Brinkley figured that minerals were the best bet for beating opium, and he asked Medlin for help. Medlin knew it would take much more sophisticated science to entice mining companies to bid for sites. Companies typically invest lots of money determining whether to mine a given site, and most of them would not send their own scientists into a war zone.

In 2009 Brinkley’s task force called on Medlin to do just that. Since then, the USGS has used satellite imagery, remote-sensing surveys and on-the-ground fieldwork under military cover to vet old estimates and pinpoint the most promising new deposits. Medlin can now say with certainty that at least half a dozen metal deposits are equivalent to those being exploited at the most productive mines around the world.

The rocks flush with rare-earth elements are situated near the heart of a dead volcano in the dry southern plains of Helmand province, not far from the village of Khanneshin. The volcanic landscape would be tricky for a geologist to navigate on foot even without the possibility of hostile militants hiding around the next crag. USGS scientists have been motivated to risk visiting the volcano, which is well within the Red Zone, in part, by the groundswell of concern about how the world’s industries will feed their ever increasing need for critical elements. China currently provides 97 percent of the world’s rare-earth supply, which makes other industrial countries nervous, particularly considering its recent slashing of exports to Japan. Global demand for other minerals is also soaring, and prices are rising with it. A decade ago copper was about 80 cents per pound; it is now roughly $4.

Medlin’s crew had tried, during two earlier marine-chaperoned visits to the volcano, to verify Soviet-era claims that rocks containing the prized metals existed there. In February the team discovered a sizable swath of rocks enriched in the so-called light rare-earth elements—including the cerium used in flat-screen TVs and the neodymium used in high-strength magnets for hybrid cars.

So far the team has mapped 1.3 million metric tons of the desirable rock in Khanneshin, holding enough rare earths to supply current world demand for 10 years. The Pentagon has estimated its value at around $7.4 billion. Another $82 billion in other critical elements may be at the site. With more time on the ground and the right kind of geophysical surveys, the scientists suspect they would discover that the rare-earth deposit could be two or three times more massive. Looking across a steep valley they did not have time to explore, the geologists say they could see what was almost certainly a continuation of the same rock formation. High-altitude imagery that measures variations in the magnetism and density of deeply buried rocks suggests the desirable material probably goes much deeper as well.

Any mining at the Khanneshin volcano would probably still be years off, however. Afghanistan has little experience with heavy industry, no real railroads and hardly any electrical power in rural areas. Those challenges are not the problem, though; major mining companies are accustomed to pioneering undeveloped frontiers in remote parts of Indonesia, Chile and Australia, for example. The need for exceptional security against hostile forces is the potential deal breaker. Coalition forces passed control of the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, to Afghan security forces in July, making regional safety even more uncertain.

Heavy Metal
Right now the multibillion-dollar investments needed to open mining in Afghanistan are more palatable in the northern half of the country, where danger is less immediate, Medlin says. And that is not a bad deal. Those areas harbor untapped masses of rock containing copper, gold and iron worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines is keen to inspire a landgrab for those commodities. The first bite came in 2007, when China Metallurgical Group outbid four other foreign investors for a lease to develop a copper deposit known as Aynak in the mountains south of Kabul. Expecting the deposit to provide $43 billion over the life of the mine, the company agreed to build two power plants to drive mining equipment and supplement the regional power grid, as well as a portion of the railroad needed to link the mine to existing rail lines in the former Soviet republics to the north.

Further interest in the country’s minerals stalled, however, until Brinkley got involved. Based on new details that Medlin’s team collected, the Pentagon has reinvigorated interest by hiring a major mining-consulting firm to compile information on the most promising sites in a format attractive to foreign investors. Late last year these efforts paid off. Western investors, led by the chair of J. P. Morgan Capital Markets, injected $50 million into a small artisanal gold prospect in an alpine valley east of Mazar-e Sharif. The goal is to get a mine up and running with local labor and modern equipment by early next year.

More activity may arise soon. With the help of the Pentagon and the World Bank, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines intends to begin auctioning off six other major mineral tracts by the end of the year. First is Afghanistan’s most potentially lucrative stash: iron concentrated in Haji-Gak, mountainous terrain about 130 kilometers west of Kabul (and conveniently close to the planned railroad northward from Aynak). Estimated at a whopping $420 billion, the resource could bring in $300 million in government revenue each year and employ 30,000 people, according to the Afghan ministry. Like many of the nation’s buried riches, portions of this vast deposit, which crops out in easily visible, dark black rocks, were discovered more than a century ago, but Afghanistan has never had the right combination of wherewithal, inclination and stability to start a major mining operation. Now it has taken the first step: enticing foreign investors. Bids were due in early September from the 23 international mining companies that lodged formal expressions of interest with the Afghan government late last year, including the Chinese Aynak contract winners.

Taking Over
Successfully closing these and other deals will require still more geology, and Afghanistan’s scientists need to take charge. Bringing them up to speed on modern science and information technology was the USGS’s primary goal in first entering the country (and still is). That goal motivates Medlin and a close USGS colleague, Said Mirzad, an Afghan-American geologist who visited the Haji-Gak iron deposit more than 30 years ago when he was director of the Afghanistan Geological Survey. Mirzad says he had a clear vision of trucking Haji-Gak’s iron ore to Pakistan or possibly developing a local steel mill. But the 1979 Soviet invasion and subsequent occupation cut that dream short. The Soviets imprisoned Mirzad multiple times before he finally fled to the U.S. with his wife and two young sons in 1981. The country’s scientific capacity stagnated in the decades of strife that ensued.

The 2001 U.S. invasion opened the door. Within three weeks of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Mirzad and Medlin received authorization—and, later, funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development—to help the Afghans firmly establish what natural resources lay buried in their native soil and to train scientists who could help advise the government about exploiting those resources. Such activities are typical work of the USGS, which has helped dozens of troubled countries rebuild their natural-resources sectors. Medlin’s team knew next to nothing about the world-class potential of Afghanistan’s copper and rare-earth deposits, and minerals certainly were not yet seen as a competitor to opium.

“After 25 years of war, we had no idea if there would be any geologists in Kabul when we got there,” recalls Mirzad, who accompanied Medlin and seven other Americans on the first USGS visit in 2004. When they arrived at the headquarters of the Afghanistan Geological Survey, they found a bombed-out, pockmarked shell next to a slaughterhouse. There were no windows, doors, plumbing or electricity. Bullet holes studded the walls; a rocket had passed clean through the director’s office. Still, roughly 100 geologists and engineers were coming into work a few hours a day, mainly to sort old reports they had hidden at home during the Taliban regime. Many of them cobbled together an income by selling cigarettes or driving taxis. Happily, their basic science training was very good. What they were missing was knowledge of the scientific and technological advances that had been developed since the early 1980s. One Afghan chemist recoiled when someone pulled out a laptop: “She wouldn’t touch it, because she was afraid it would electrocute her,” Medlin recalls.

Teaching the Afghan scientists the fundamental concept of plate tectonics was central. This theory—that the planet’s crust is broken up, like a jigsaw puzzle, into pieces that move and crash together—revolutionized understanding of the earth in the years after the Afghans were cut off from the outside world. It explains why earthquakes occur, volcanoes erupt and mountains rise up. It also explains why Afghanistan, slightly smaller than Texas, is so unusually rife with minerals. Much of the now landlocked country formed through collisions of four or five crust pieces. These convergent boundaries tend to be where many of the world’s major metal deposits occur.

One exercise the scientists hope to carry out is a detailed geophysical survey over the Khanneshin volcano. Medlin’s crew, with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, had conducted airborne surveys from a high-flying NP-3D aircraft based on craft used for hunting down enemy submarines during the cold war. By charting the earth’s magnetism and other properties, the geophysicists generated three-dimensional views of the uppermost 10 kilometers of Afghanistan’s bedrock. Flown slowly and at lower altitude, the same instruments could discern far greater detail, revealing how specific mineral deposits extend down into the ground. The $7.4-billion estimate for the rare earths there assumes, very conservatively, that the rock is only 100 meters thick. It could easily be thicker. Medlin had hoped to do that survey, but the security clearance never came—too much risk of the plane being shot down, he assumes. So he convinced Brinkley to buy the Afghanistan Geological Survey the same instruments that can be carried on foot, and Medlin is bringing Afghan geologists to the U.S. to learn how to use them.

Medlin and Mirzad are both pleased with a $6.5-million renovation of the Afghanistan Geological Survey headquarters building in Kabul, which has left it looking as good as its American counterpart in northern Virginia, Mirzad says. “And the cafeteria is better,” he adds with a wink. The Afghan agency now houses a state-of-the-art digital data center and employs 100 full-time scientists and engineers who are conducting mineral-assessment surveys on their own. The Afghans’ recent field-work at a copper deposit near Dusar-Shaida is the main reason it is included among those scheduled for upcoming bidding, Medlin says.

Formidable Challenges
The advancing science makes it clear that lucrative mining is finally possible in Afghanistan, and for the first time major investors are poised to commit. A national economy driven by mining could end opium’s dominance and help to stabilize the country, which would give the U.S. and other nations good reason to scale back their heavy military involvement there.
Even so, some Afghans worry about whether mining would be good for the nation’s people. Major mineral exploitation in some poor countries has been more curse than blessing. The discovery of oil in Nigeria more than 50 years ago has earned billions of dollars for

Earthquakes and Drought Could Slow Afghanistan's Mining

Natural challenges add to concern about Taliban interference
By Sarah Simpson | Thursday, September 22, 2011

Even if Taliban forces and opium warlords do not try to interfere with mining by Afghan or international companies, other factors could complicate commercialization. Challenges faced at the country’s largest development project, the planned copper mine at Aynak, 20 kilometers south of Kabul, are emblematic

For one thing, the huge site that China Metallurgical Group leased for mining encompasses a national treasure: ruins of ancient Buddhist monasteries that many Afghans hope will be protected.

Recent U.S. Geological Survey investigations suggest that earthquakes and water scarcity could threaten operations as well. "An earthquake could set them back five or 10 years in less than a minute,” says Anthony Crone, who leads the USGS seismic hazard–assessment team. Kabul has about the same earthquake risk as Port-au-Prince in Haiti, where more than 200,000 people died during the January 2010 quake that struck there. That earthquake released strain that had been building along massive blocks of the earth’s crust moving in opposite directions for some 500 years. A similar tale is playing out along Afghanistan’s Chaman fault system, which extends southwest of Kabul.

Water scarcity is another concern. The three million to four million people who live in and around the city—more than 10 percent of the country’s population—draw all their water from about 1,000 shallow wells in the Kabul Basin. The region has been in severe drought since 2000, with no precipitation at all in the past five years. USGS water specialists predict that more than half of the wells may dry up simply because of greater water needs by a growing population. A new copper mine, which demands a lot of water, could add to the strain.

10 Years Later, Afghanistan's Locked-up Wealth
By Sarah Simpson | Sat Sep 10, 2011 02:17 PM ET


As armed forces swarmed Afghanistan during the 2001 U.S.-led invasion to dismantle Al-Qaeda terrorist cells and topple the Taliban regime, and now its insurgency, a small group of geologists from the US Geological Survey worked to help the country find new opportunities.

Said Mirzad (on the left in the photo above) had fled Afghanistan during Soviet occupation, settling in the United States in 1981. His background as a former director of the Afghanistan Geological Survey made him a natural fit working with the U.S. Geological Survey where he dreamed of one day helping rebuild Afghanistan’s scientific capacity and its natural resource sectors -- something he’d seen the USGS do in dozens of troubled countries around the world.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the USGS appointed Mirzad as co-coordinator of Afghanistan programs to help the Afghans firmly assess the mineral deposits that lay buried in their native soil and to train that country’s scientists to do the same work on their own.

Together with Jack Medlin, the agency’s specialist for the Southeast Asia-Pacific region, Mirzad and a team of about 50 other USGS scientists discovered that Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is more vast and varied than anyone realized. The massive deposits—including iron, copper, gold, lithium and rare earth elements—may be worth $1 trillion or more.

BLOG: Why Lithium Can't Save Afghanistan

In Mirzad’s point of view, convincing investors to tap those resources could lift Afghanistan out of decades of strife and poverty. A full USGS report on the new science is due out at the end of the month. Meanwhile, Mirzad reflects on the changes he’s seen over the past 10 years:

DNews: What was your basic vision when you were pressing for a USGS mission in Afghanistan?

Mirzad: My basic bottom line was this: Everyone was saying that Afghanistan is an agricultural country, but I always believed that agriculture feeds people, but it doesn’t create the kind of wealth Afghanistan needed to sustain itself. I was sure the most important pillar of the Afghan economy was minerals and mining. The other thing that was in my mind was that no one would believe the science of the Soviets in order to invest in the country. I wanted this work to be done by an organization like the USGS.

DNews: What about people who argue that mining is not good for a poor, underdeveloped country?
Mirzad: You want them to sit on a gold mine and starve? C’mon.

DNews: I’ve had several people ask me why Afghanistan’s mineral resources have not been exploited before now. Why is that?

Mirzad: During the Cold War, and during hundreds of years before that, Afghanistan was a buffer state. Nothing could get inside Afghanistan, and nothing from inside Afghanistan could get outside. I was a powerful director of Afghanistan Geological Survey; I was an adviser to the king. And still I could not take a western geologist within 30 kilometers of the Russian border…. The Russians didn’t want to create a mining industry in Afghanistan, because the poverty would be gone and Afghanistan would stand on its own feet and they would lose it…. The westerners were not interested to come in Afghanistan because the Russians were saying ‘what are you doing in our back yard?’ Afghanistan stayed that way for hundreds of years. And what was left for Afghanistan? Agriculture.
DNews: What has changed in the past 10 years in terms of what we know about Afghanistan’s mineral wealth?

Mirzad: In 2001 we had some geological maps of Afghanistan, but that’s not enough. We now have data packages for different minerals and different parts of Afghanistan that can be given to any investor for decision-making. Before the information was qualitative; now we have quantitative scientific data and information. Before you had just a paper saying there are minerals in Afghanistan; now we have the paper saying that this location is better than that one for mining gold, for example.
The work that we have done is systematic. We did not try going in with a flash of glory. We did things very systematically. When you do things systematically they’re boring, but in the end you have a better result. This is how the US Geological Survey works. We are responsible to our own organization and we are hard on you if you don’t do a good job. This is why people have confidence in what the USGS does.

DNews: What has changed in the past 10 years in terms of Afghanistan’s scientific capacity?

Mirzad: This is what I am most proud of. In 2003, when I first was back in Kabul, we found about 100 geologists. I asked them what they were doing. They weren’t doing much, but they were there. The thing was that the science had passed by them for 30 years. They were demoralized. They told me they thought their business was dead. What we did was to do the work with them. First, we were in the drivers seat and they were looking over our shoulders, then they were in the drivers seat and we were looking over their shoulders. Now they are flying with their own wings. They know how to sample, they know how to tag the sample, and they know how to send it to us to analyze or analyze it themselves.
IMAGE: USGS geologist Said Mirzad (left) talking with Stephen G. Peters, project chief for the USGS minerals team in Afghanistan, as they map deposits in southern Afghanistan with protection from U.S. marines. (Courtesy Robert D. Tucker)


Afghanistan: Rare Earth Elements could Beat the Taliban [Slide Show]
Vast deposits of rare-earth and critical minerals found in Afghanistan by U.S. geologists under military cover could solve world shortages and get the country off opium and Taliban control. Photos show their gutsy excursions.
By Sarah Simpson | September 27, 2011
Article: Afghanistan: Rare Earth Elements could Beat the Taliban [Slide Show] »September 27, 2011

Sniper Stands Guard:
The rocks flush with rare earth elements, crucial to high-tech manufacturing, are situated close to a dead volcano near Khanneshin. The landscape is tricky enough for a geologist to navigate, but U.S. marines also protect against the possibility of hostile militants hiding around the next crag.
Robert D. Tucker/USGS


Hard Hat Zone:
Like the soldiers, geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey sport helmets and heavy ceramic vests even as they discuss the mining potential of a large outcrop. Each investigation is limited to an hour so that hostile forces do not have time to organize and descend.
Robert D. Tucker/USGS

On The Trail:
With a perimeter established, marines allow the geologists to remove their helmets, but the human chain of soldiers continually encircles them as they pursue clues in the rock.
Robert D. Tucker/USGS

Persistence Pays Off:
The scientists finally discover a promising seam of mustard-colored rock (here with a hand lens for scale). Work later on, in the lab, bears out the geologists’ prediction: the enrichment of light rare-earth elements in this sample is on par with the ore mined at Bayan Obo in China, which currently produces 97 percent of the world’s rare earth supply
Robert D. Tucker/USGS

Looking Ahead:
From his high vantage point, this geologist can see what is almost certainly a continuation of the same rare-earth-rich rock formation the team sampled. The full deposit may be double or triple what the geologists have been able to map so far.
Robert D. Tucker/USGS

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