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Rachel Masters

Nuclear Explosion, Crowd Control All Part Of Bangladesh Adventure

Detecting a nuclear explosion on a seismic recording and attracting the attention of thousands of Bangladeshis was all in a day's work for a young geophysicist, on her first overseas adventure in the oil and gas industry.

It was 1998 and Rachel Masters was just 20 years old when she stepped off an aeroplane at the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, fresh out of university and raring for some action. Masters had always wanted to be in the earth sciences industry ever since she met her first geophysicist as a 14-year-old high school student visiting Perth universities to help figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

"My best friend and I were the top two girls in science at Swan View Senior High School so we went to Curtin University to find out what was on offer career-wise", Masters said. The medical and engineering professions didn't do much for her and she was getting distraught until she stumbled upon the geophysics department.

"I walked in and there was all these blokes wearing jeans and sneakers", she said. "They told me about all the money they earned and all the places they travelled to. And they deal with rocks, which was something people didn't die from, and you don't have to deal with emotional issues, so I decided that is what I wanted to do."

Masters was dux of her high school graduation year in 1994 and attended Curtin University, studying for a Bachelor of Science degree in geophysics, which she received a distinction for. She was about to embark on a career in the minerals industry, but fate was to intervene in the form of a little job ad placed on a lecturer's window. Wanted: junior processing geophysicist in Indonesia, or Bangladesh - in small print. Masters had had enough of study by this time and decided to apply for the job.

So at the start of 1998, after finding where Dhaka was in the atlas, Masters embarked on her first overseas gig in the oil and gas industry. She had been encouraged to take the job by her then boyfriend (and now husband) Paul who, having been to Timor, thought a visit to Bangladesh would be a good experience for her.

"When I got off the plane I thought to myself that I had three options", Masters said. "I could get back on the plane, sit down and cry or keep walking, so I kept walking." She was working on a transition zone seismic survey for Grant Geophysical, who was contracted to Cairn Energy.

She started working as a junior processing geophysicist. The transition zone survey recorded an average distance of between 3-6 km a day due to the extreme tidal ranges along the coast. "We would have a big party if we got 12 km of data in a day", she said. The equipment was not what you would call high tech. "We were using nine-track tapes and I would process it to final stack before it was sent back to Aberdeen", she said.

Masters was one of only three women in the crew, the other two were local Bangladeshi women who gave her an insight into the Bangladeshi lifestyle. "Living in close quarters with these women was an eye opener with the things that they have to endure," she said.

One of the activities not on her job description was to act as a decoy when it came time to move camp. "There were thousands of people and obviously they were very interested in what we were doing", she said. "I would get sent off down the mudflat, which they loosely referred to as a beach, and everyone would follow me while they moved all the equipment and then I would run back and jump aboard."

The crew moved around the Bay of Bengal about seven times during the survey and at one stage was living on a ship in the Karnaphuli River, where Masters encountered the occasional animal carcass floating down the river. The crew was also kept on its toes by the numerous cyclones that are common in the region.

An interesting processing moment came when she was trying to identify an unusual shape on a day's recording. "A few shot records from that day's recordings were not the usual shape you get from reflectors from a seismic point source", she said. "They were all over the place and were not nicely vertically aligned."

After considering many theories, including the possibility that it was caused by dolphins on the line, Masters found, in one of her books, that the shot record was from a distant seismic line source, far removed from the recording equipment. "I found out later that this would have coincided with India setting off their nuclear tests, so we had our line source", she said.

Towards the end of 1998 Masters started to think about moving on. "Bangladesh was great for the experience but I got to the end of the year and I thought that was enough because I wasn't learning any more with Grant Geophysical, being limited by production all the time", she said.

Paul came over at the end of 1998 and they went "hardcore backpacking" around South East Asia for three months. During this time the couple pursued their love of scuba diving and obtained work at Phuket with a German dive company. But the money eventually ran out and Masters' dad was promptly asked to pay for the air fare back home in early 1999.

Masters then hit the job-seeking trail in Perth, at a time when the oil price was $10 bbl and not many processing houses were hiring. She almost found a job with headhunting firm Mason Transearch when a position as marketing geophysicist at TGS-Nopec came up.

"I got the job at TGS-Nopec marketing the AGSO 2D regional seismic grid and other non-exclusive projects in Indonesia, Australian and New Zealand", she said. "That was really good, but after three years I thought I needed a bit of a change, and the job here [Fugro Multi Client Services (FMCS)] came up so I applied for that and have been here for nine months now."

Masters is a geophysicist at FMCS and she has several roles within the company, including marketing its Brazilian and Australian datasets and other new project developments. But the Brazil gig seems to be one of her favourites, with lots of travel to North and South America.

"I love working here", she said. "It is a very good environment, their whole approach to the business is very positive." FMCS is a non-exclusive seismic data company, formerly Seismic Australia. "The organisation has mainly reprocessed old data and it is amazing the improvements we see in data quality by applying the modern processing algorithms and techniques. For new and frontier areas the option exists for new acquisition data once we get a feel for the data issues and prospectivity."

Masters is reveling in the challenges being presented to her at FMCS and said, when asked where she sees herself in five to ten years time, she wouldn't mind starting up a successful regional office for the company in one of the places she is currently trying to set up new projects. Or, maybe one day, owning her own oil company. As they say, the sky's the limit, but she probably won't be setting up shop in Bangladesh. Been there, done that.