“He has a third eye for rocks,” said geologist and friend Noe Caagusan.
“He is the Philippines’ number one geologist. He will remain an icon in the field of geology petrography,” Dr. Guillermo Balce, former director of Mines and Geosciences Bureau, said in a message read at the National Institute of Geological Studies (NIGS) of the University of the Philippines on December 6.
Artists, activists, government officials, and scientists raised their glasses for Rolando “Rolly” Peña during a recent two-day memorial following his death last November 30. The geologist and left-wing revolutionary was toasted for his excellent achievements in science and for his key role in the anti-Marcos movement. He was killed in a road accident near his condo in Quezon City. He was 77.
Peña authored the Lexicon of Philippine Stratigraphy, published in 2008; and Geology of the Philippines, volume two, published in 2004. “They are now the Bible of geologists,” said young geologist and Peña’s mentee, Malyn Tumonong.
NIGS director Dr. Mario Aurelio, Vice of the Philippine National Oil Corporation Raymundo Savella, and Dr. Benjamin Austria of the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC), cited the importance of Peña’s books to geological history and geo-hazard predictions.
Peña’s Lexicon identifies the geologic formations of various places in the Philippines based on layers (stratification) of rocks, their ages, evolution, and geologic events in hundreds of millions of years. Its deep data, both ancient and new, give historic numbers to corals, mountains, rock formations, seas, and volcanoes that tourists often describe as awesome, beautiful, and unusual.
“The Lexicon explains why the formation of Bicol, southern Luzon, is so rare,” said geologist Caagusan. He referred to the 260-kilometre long volcanic Bicol arc on the central-eastern margin of the Philippine Mobile Belt—a region enclosed by the Philippine Trench and the Manila-Negros Cotabato trench systems.
Peña’s Geology is about thousands of rocks in the Philippines, their names, classification, birthdays, histories, and geo-chemistry or mineral contents. It ended the rampant and erroneous updating and renaming of Philippine rocks, said Caagusan. Geology’s volume one was done by earlier generations of foreign and local geologists who Peña worked for as a petrologist in periods of field work that lasted six to 11 months a year from the 60s to the mid-70s.
A committee of the Geological Society of the Philippines helped Peña finalize the Philippine Stratigraphic Guide in 2000; and Geology’s draft in 2004. He proposed the writing of the Lexicon of Philippine Stratigraphy in a symposium of geologists in Cebu, central Philippines in 1997; and Geology’s second volume when Toti Almeda was chief geologist of the Bureau of Mines, in 1995.
Followers poetically described Peña’s work ethics and qualities as a geologist. If he was described as possessing a third eye for rocks, Tumonong says, “He used his tongue to identify mineral content of rocks. He has a keen hand lens-assisted rock analysis, and expertise in interpreting data from a petrographic microscope.”
Peña was also interested in the geological histories of other nations. “When I told him I would take up Masters in public health in Maastrastricht, Holland, he excitedly narrated the geological evolution of that place,” said Dr. Sibyl Jade Peña of the Paris-based Medicins Sans Frontieres, Peña’s daughter by United States-based writer Ninotchka Rosca.
Peña was with a team that gathered hydrographic, ecological, geophysical data, and scientific investigations to show that Benham Rise is part of the 350-mile continental shelf that extends from the baseline of northeastern Philippines—when the government claimed the continental shelf before the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in April 2009. Benham, a seismically active undersea volcano has a diameter of 250 kilometers, a depth of 5,000 meters, and is located 250 kilometers east of Dinapigue, Isabela. The UN approved the government’s claim in April 2012. The Congressional approval of the Archipelagic Baseline Law in March 2009 was the basis of the claim.
After serving as regional director of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (the new name of the Bureau of Mines) from 1999 up to his retirement in 2006, Peña collaborated with several foreign scientists in definitive studies about the archaeological sculpting of the Philippines.
Peña was absent from the Bureau of Mines from 1974 to 1991.
It was the late Dr Raymundo Punongbayan, former director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) who was responsible for his return to the Bureau of Mines in 1991—as if he never left.
That’s because he was stranded in China from 1974 to 1986 because the M/V Andrea that he helped navigate for a second arms-landing of war materials from Beijing for the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New Peoples’ Army (CPP-NPA), sank on Pratas Reef, 170 nautical miles southeast of Hong Kong, in 1974. He was to get automatic rifles from the Chinese Communist Party on Sanya Naval Base.
In July 1972, Peña navigated a 20-foot wooden hulled boat from Cavite, southern Luzon to Isabela on northeast Luzon, to upload 1,200 M-14 rifles, bazookas, mortars, communication equipment and medical kits from MV Karagatan, at Digoyo Point, Palanan, Isabela, northern Luzon. Karagatan’s shipment from Fukien was brought to NPA members who waited in a beach, but a combined air, naval, and ground forces prevented the completion of the arms-landing for a week. Military sources said they recovered 467 M-14 rifles under the sea and in two abandoned leftist camps in the mountains of Quirino province. The Karagatan incident prompted Marcos to declare martial law in September 1972, said Senator Juan Ponce Enrile.
Peña was one of several writers and artists who formed the leftist Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK), initially in UP and, later, in other schools and universities, in the early 70s. It was an offshoot of the bigger Kabataang Makabayan (KM), both launched together the First Quarter Storm from January to March 1970, and the Diliman Commune in UP in February 1971. These events prompted Marcos to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus on August 23, 1971, a prelude to martial law.
Albert Lesaca, a former member of the Ministry of Human Settlement, and Peña’s UP High School batchmate called him soft-spoken and ever-smiling. “Rol never bragged about his expertise,” Lesaca says, “after he graduated from UP, he lived a compartmentalized life as a geologist and as a dedicated communist. He lived for others, for geologists and comrades as well.”