Version 1.1, 24 April 2013. — 96 p.
The purpose of this book is to place field photographs taken over about five years of working (mostly in
SW Mongolia) into a broad outline of
Mongolian geology that may be useful to someone. It doesn’t claim any authority on the subject, but is merely a chance to get information that might otherwise be lost, into the public domain. This Version (1.0) is little more than a rough dump of images that will get tidied up as I get the time.
Mongolia is a very large country with a correspondingly complicated geology. As a field geologist coming to work in
Mongolia it very soon became apparent how well the geology of the country had been mapped by
Mongolian and Soviet-era geologists. Sure, there is much to be gained by further specialist mapping and by geologists looking from a different perspective, but the broader point is that the earlier geos didn’t miss much. There was little chance of finding something new behind that hill over there – because in most cases, it was clear someone had looked. Nevertheless, much of this earlier work is very hard to obtain for a western geologist, and in any case, is mostly written in Mongolian or Russian. In my own work it has been useful to coin some words for geological units – but on the understanding they may well be already known under different names in the Mongolian-Russian literature.
