MILITARY MEDICAL GEOLOGY OPPORTUNITIES

To be successful, the military must have situational awareness and the capacity to forwardly deploy to remote locations worldwide. The Occupational and Environmental Health Site Assessment (OEHSA) is a process to identify occupational and environmental health threats at existing garrisons and deployed sites.

New locations can pose challenges in such areas as field constructions, resource acquisition, and tactical and strategic terrain analysis. Military public health, bioenvironmental engineers and flight surgeons at deployed sites are not trained to assess geological conditions that could potentially threaten the health of assigned personnel.

For example, at serpentine landscapes there can be significant concentrations of heavy metals such as chromium, nickel, cobalt, and asbestos from the weathering of ultramafic rocks from the Earth’s mantle outcropping at the Earth’s surface. Serpentine landscapes and soils are found globally. Another example of a potentially serious medical geological hazard often not recognized are the high concentrations of erionite, a known human carcinogen, found in soils from weathered volcanic rocks. Deposits of erionite have been found in Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Texas, Utah, North Dakota, Oregon and forty foreign countries. In arid and semiarid environments, nanofibrous clays such as palygorskite and sepiolite, which are magnesium aluminum silicates often found in near surface deposits, can also be problematic when airborne and inhaled.

The military health community needs to develop medical geology situational awareness and recognize that, in addition to anthropogenic hazardous materials, there are natural geological formations, shallow deposits, and other areas of concern that can contain significant levels of human carcinogens that can cause human mortality and morbidity when disturbed.