News

Students and professors involved in the PRODIGY program are returning home after two weeks of intensive field school at the Foundacion San Ignacio del Huinay. The foundation’s field station is located on the shore of the Comau Fjord, one the many fjords that make up the extensive Patagonian fjord network. 

During the first week of field school, PRODIGY Year 1 students designed research projects, collected oceanographic data across Comau Fjord, and capped off the week by presenting their findings. During the second week, the Year 2 cohort completed their own research projects. Research questions covered a broad range of topics, including: surface and intermediate water circulation patterns in the fjord, dissolved oxygen dynamics in the fjord, and an investigation of a potential fault line in the ocean floor of fjord. 

The PRODIGY (Pacific Rim Ocean Data Mobilization and Technology) program is designed to train future ocean leaders across every stage of the ocean data life-cycle; from initial sensor development and testing, to using data-driven findings to engage community stakeholders and policy decision-makers. Students and post-doctoral fellows in the program represent a selection of Canadian and Chilean institutions including: Universities of British Columbia, Waterloo, Victoria, and Concepción. Participants also come from a wide range of academic backgrounds, such as oceanography, geophysics, and computer science. 

PRODIGY fosters interdisciplinary and international collaboration among early-career scientists studying coastal areas facing similar challenges: rapidly growing aquaculture industries, communities developed in zones subject to earthquake and tsunami risk, and changing physical and biogeochemical within delicate fjord ecosystems. The program is funded for another three years. Those interested can view the available positions and supervising faculty here.

Last December, the Visualizing Climate Action team from the Climate Action Lab won second place at HUBBUB, a City Hall event where students share innovative ideas and solutions for city-building with City staff and elected officials.

Members of the team come from a variety of backgrounds; they include Nicholas Samuelson (Cellular, Anatomical, and Physiological Sciences), Rachel Habermehl (Geographical Sciences), Yeslie Lizarraga (Sociology), Joaquin Gutierrez (Integrated Sciences integrating Climate and Sustainability), and Kōlea Praywell (Environment and Sustainability).

The Visualizing Climate Action project uses displays to visualize climate action in Vancouver (see poster below; click to expand). The displays link climate change to meaningful places that people already treasure and care about. “We want to make climate change personal to people, so it's easier for them to act upon it,” said the team. “The bond people have with physical locations and resources allows them to tie their climate action into a concrete contextualized goal in a hopeful tone.”

One of the highlights of the project is that it can engage people. “Our main goal is to engage as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Whether or not you want to, you are going to get engaged when you see the display.” Some of the comments the team received from the City of Vancouver was that targeting and working with emotions was unique. In addition, the displays will direct people to climate resource hubs that the community already has, making it easier for people to learn and act.

When asked about their motivation for the idea of visualizing climate change, the team said that they actually had several hour-long meetings when they started the project, just to go through all their ideas. The display idea came up early and they thought it was very engaging. Then they wanted to connect it to something that Vancouverites are identified with, one of which is climate - the beautiful scenery people live in. By combining the display and climate, the team wanted to give people a sense of discomfort about their surroundings by showing them what they will encounter in fifty years if they don't act now. “We got a lot of positive feedback on targeting emotions, but we also need a sense of hope for people to have something to work towards,” said the team. Therefore, climate resources were also integrated into the display to show people how to take action to prevent that discomfort from happening in the future.

The experience of working alongside the City of Vancouver and participating in HUBBUB was memorable, according to the team. “We engaged with all the people we talked to and especially, a lot of people that work in the City. It felt collaborative that everyone wanted to hear what we had to say.” They also had some great conversations with the audience, such as discussing how many changes have taken place in the city over the past 50 years. “It was interesting to see how people can think of changes that we didn't necessarily know before.”

The team was glad that they took the jump by targeting people’s emotions and managed to bring a sense of hope with climate action. "It was scary to do something different, but we took a chance and it definitely paid off. We received a lot of positive feedback at HUBBUB. Everyone we gave a presentation to left happy and gave us good comments.”

The City of Vancouver is now offering an internship for a graduate student to follow up on this work through the Sustainability Scholars Program. Description of the Visualizing Climate Action project can be found here: 2023-054 Development of graphics to visualize climate action and inaction in Vancouver. Deadline to apply is January 29.

Dr. Lindsey Heagy, Assistant Professor at EOAS, has taken a new role as Director of UBC-Geophysical Inversion Facility (UBC-GIF).

Dr. Heagy is interested in data science and inverse theory applied to questions in resource exploration, groundwater, and environmental studies. She is also a faculty member of UBC’s Mathematics of Information, Learning and Data (MILD) group, focusing on machine learning and inverse problems. Her research group primarily focuses on machine learning and inversion methods with geophysical data including electrical and electromagnetic data as well as potential fields (gravity and magnetic data) to characterize the subsurface.

“I am very excited to be taking on the role of director of the Geophysical Inversion Facility (GIF),” said Dr. Heagy. “We are at an important point in time for near-surface and applied geophysics. There are significant opportunities for geophysics to play a role in solutions to challenges we are facing in society, especially in light of the climate crisis. Locating and managing groundwater, monitoring CO2 sequestration, characterizing permafrost loss and other impacts of climate change, and importantly locating the mineral resources we need to facilitate the energy transition, are all applications where we require the ability to image the subsurface. Geophysics gives us the ability to do this by measuring data over the surface of the earth that are sensitive to variations in physical properties of the subsurface. The Geophysical Inversion Facility is focussed on developing computational methods for extracting insights from geophysical data.”

Over the past 30 years, GIF research, under the leadership of Doug Oldenburg, has laid the foundation for the ability to simulate and invert a wide range of geophysical data, including gravity, magnetics, electrical, and electromagnetic data to obtain physical property models of the subsurface. “We now have the ability to solve problems that work with hundreds of thousands of data where we are estimating millions of model parameters. The next generation of GIF will build upon this foundation and integrate advances in machine learning,” said Dr. Heagy.

Dr. Heagy also shared about what she and the GIF hope to achieve in the next few years. “Our goal is to contribute to solutions of problems that are important to society. Locating mineral resources, managing groundwater, monitoring CO2, or remediating land are inherently interdisciplinary questions. Geophysics has a role to play, and the more that we can integrate with other disciplines, the more value geophysics can bring to the table. Our research develops computational methods that enable the integration of information, including geophysical, geological, geochemical, and other data to obtain insights about the subsurface. GIF has established itself as a leader in numerical simulations and inversions; in the next few years, an emphasis of our research will be on the integration of machine learning with inversions.”

“Two important components that have contributed to the success of GIF have been the close collaboration with the mining industry, which has provided data and research questions, and the subsequent dissemination of our work through the distribution of production-quality software. In our next phase, we plan to continue working with industry-relevant data sets to help formulate our research questions and solutions, and to keep distributing software to enable this work to be useable by others. The GIF Fortran codes are widely used by industry and academic groups worldwide. In the next few years, we will transition our model of software dissemination to an open-source model of development, through the SimPEG project. Collaborations through SimPEG have already facilitated humanitarian projects aimed at locating potable drinking water, as well as new ways to collaborate with industry because anyone can use, build upon and contribute to the project. I am looking forward to exploring new modes of collaboration that are enabled by the transition to an open-source model of dissemination.”

“GIF 2.0 is composed of a talented team of students, postdocs, and research associates working on projects in mineral exploration, groundwater, CO2 sequestration, and environmental applications. Connections with industry provide context and data on problems that are important to solve, and open-source software provides avenues for our work to contribute to solutions. We have the ingredients to make some meaningful contributions and I am excited to see what we can achieve together,” said Dr. Heagy.

To learn more about the UBC-GIF, such as their program, people, research and publications, software: https://gif.eos.ubc.ca/about
Listen to our podcast with Dr. Heagy: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/on-earth-with-dr-lindsey-heagy-geo-data-scientist/id1562034229?i=1000525904011

Alexis Bahl, PhD candidate in oceanography at UBC’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences and the Institute of Oceans and Fisheries, and three other UBC scientists have set out for an expedition to the Southern Ocean to study how salps, a type of tiny gelatinous zooplankton, can help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Along with 40+ additional scientists with different areas of focus, the UBC team boarded the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Polarstern icebreaker on October 1^st and they will come back on November 17^th. Scroll down to watch our interviews with Alexis and Dr. Pakhomov.

Salps travel from deep in the ocean to the surface at night and return to the cold-water depths upon sunrise, forming the world’s largest migration. “This migration, it occurs when the sun sets, and then they go up to the surface and feed on phytoplankton, which are rich in carbon. So the salps, by proxy, are rich in carbon. And then when the sun rises, they move back down to the depths to decay,” said Alexis. “So they swim down and excrete, effectively transporting carbon to the sea floor where it’s stored for centuries. Because the Southern Ocean stores about 40 per cent of global carbon, it’s important to understand how much of a role this organism will have in mitigating climate change.”

Alexis is part of the macrozooplankton and micronekton team in this journey. Funded by the National Geographic Society, the team is led by EOAS UBC professor Evgeny Pakhomov and comprised of Lora Pakhomov, Alexis Bahl, and Florian Lueskow, with a particular interest in collecting the most abundant tunicate species in the Southern Ocean.

Read more:

Alexis' expedition blog: https://www.alexisannebahl.com/blog
Vancouver Sun: UBC researchers embark on voyage to study how climate change affects tiny ocean creature
Radio Canada: 48 jours en Antarctique pour photographier la salpe, un plancton voyageur
Early Career Ocean Professionals: Alexis Bahl: an ECOP exploring salps in the southern ocean
UBC news: How the largest migration on Earth might help combat climate change

If you wandered through the Earth Sciences Building this week you may have noticed the walls of the lobby featured a dozen new posters covering a diverse range of topics. The recent poster session was the culmination of weeks of work by EOSC 212 students. 

EOSC 212: Topics in Earth and Planetary Sciences has been taught by Prof. Mark Jellinek since 2006. Since its origin, EOSC 212 has been about pushing students to break down their preconditioned approaches to learning to make space for questioning and open discussion of presented information. The course is designed to build critical reading, thinking, writing, and communication skills. Students are evaluated on their ability to effectively communicate complex concepts through writing and mind maps, rather than their test taking abilities. Mind maps allow students to visualize the connections between topics so the big picture becomes easier to convey. This visualization skill translates across disciplines, but is especially useful in Earth Sciences where subjects are more often than not deeply interconnected. 

Finally, students are asked to produce a research poster where they chase down a question of their own relating to a dataset of their choice. The resulting posters are a collection of diverse and creative ideas with topical titles such as:

• How and to what extent did COVID-19 affect greenhouse gas emissions?

• What drives tropical cyclones and what is the sensitivity of drivers to global warming?

• Does “fracking” affect groundwater resources significantly?

• How does ozone depletion affect Earth’s ecosystems?

• Can atmospheric rivers affect the stability the Larsen Ice shelf

• How has glacial retreat in central Asia affected slope stability?

• How is the history of seafloor spreading and subduction expressed in the age distributions and chemistry of rocks?

• How is the accelerating instability of Greenland ice affecting human settlements?

• What is the spatial character of recent extreme melting events on Greenland?

• How will sea level rise affect Vancouver?

• Is climate change going to shred tourism in Vancouver?"

Click here to see posters from previous years. 

On Saturday 26^th November 2022, we held a Gala Dinner to celebrate (albeit a little late) the 25^th anniversary of the UBC EOAS Department. This event has been over a year in the planning, organised by a driven group of graduate students from our Department: Ruth Moore, Eva Gnegy, Catriona Breasley, Sacchi Pillai and Cara James. With a turnout of around 200 people, including all five Heads of the department, a three-course dinner, celebration cake, speeches and dancing until late in the evening, the event was definitely one to remember. 

For the opening remarks reflecting on the anniversary by Philippe Tortell, Head of EOAS, please scroll down to the bottom or click here.

Celebration cake depicting (bottom to top) the Earth, Oceans and Atmosphere. With moon and planet vegan and gluten-free cupcakes

Organising committee, from left to right: Catriona Breasley, Sacchi Pillai, Eva Gnegy, Ruth Moore, Cara James

We started the night with a champagne reception, as faculty, staff and graduate students had a chance to chat to each other outside of the usual laboratory or classroom setting. As everyone found their seats, Philippe Tortell, the current department head, gathered around with the four past holders of the same role (Robert Ellis, Paul Smith, Greg Dipple, Roger Beckie) and welcomed everyone to the event, inviting them to take their seats as the starter was served.

EOAS graduate students pictured enjoying a rare evening spent out of lab coats and fieldwork gear

EOAS Faculty (left to right: Mark Jellinek, Kirsten Hodge, Catherine Johnson, Valentina Radić)

Over the course of the next couple of hours, as we dined on plates such as miso roasted ling cod and strawberry mille feuille, we were treated to a range of presentations and speeches that took us through the past, present and future of not only our department but also the field of Earth Sciences in general. Paul Smith, department head from 2000 – 2009, spoke about the tumultuous journey that was taken to design the teaching courses as we see them today, and how the design of our beloved Earth Sciences Building on campus came to be. Philippe Tortell, current department head, talked about the present state of Earth Sciences and the incredible work going on in our department today. Emily Fischer, alumnus of UBC, shared with us a short video about the challenges to come in our field and how she has high hopes for the students in the room. Finally, recent graduate students Katrin Davidsdottir, Julia Jeworrek and Yohan Gilchrist wrapped up the presentations by looking ahead to how we can adapt our research to face these future issues together.

Paul Smith, department head 2000-2009

The final presenters for the evening, from left to right, Philippe Tortell, Julia Jeworrek, Johan Gilchrist and Katrin Steinthorsdottir

With the end of the meal came the cutting of the EOAS Celebration Cake, and the band, The Werewolves, started to play covers of hits young and old to please the diverse age range in the crowd. Within minutes the dance floor was full, and essentially stayed that way for the remainder of the night. Who knew Earth Scientists were such keen dancers?!

All-in-all, an incredible night to be remembered, anyone else counting down to the 30^th anniversary…?

Opening remarks by Philippe Tortell, Head of EOAS

November 26, 2022

Dear colleagues, friends and guests,

I’m delighted to welcome you all here for this very special evening, as we gather on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples to celebrate an important milestone in the history of the EOAS department.  Twenty-five years ago, a group of scholars was brought together, likely against the will of many, to begin an experiment in cohabitation and coexistence. Tonight, we will celebrate the remarkable achievements of this group and those that have followed in their footsteps. We will also reflect on how we and the society around us have evolved over the past quarter century, and consider the challenges and opportunities that face us into the future.

As we reflect on the past twenty-five years of our history, roughly the length of a single human generation, we must appreciate the multi-generational Indigenous history of these lands, going back thousands of years, during which First Nations people have gained deep insights into the inter-connectedness of the Earth system.  From this perspective, our time together has been only the briefest interlude in a long story.  And yet, over that short moment in time, our planet has seen unprecedented change. 

A brief look back to the mid-1990s, when EOAS was amalgamated, is instructive. By that point, Earth observing systems and computer models were sufficiently advanced to clearly demonstrate a ‘discernable human influence on global climate’, as famously stated in the 1995 IPCC Assessment Report, which was a major impetus for the Kyoto protocol in 1997. That same year, just one year after the formation of EOAS, atmospheric pCO₂ was 360 ppm and the last Indian residential school closed in Canada.  It would be more than a decade before the Canadian government issued an apology, and nearly twenty years before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada issued its landmark report and recommendations.

Fast forward to 2022. Both our planet and our societies have changed remarkably.  Climate targets have been set and missed again and again, as globalization – spurned by the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 – has vastly increased humanity’s consumption of natural resources. With increasing precision, our scientific tools are allowing us to document the significant negative impacts of these activities.  Current atmospheric pCO₂ is 415 ppm, nearly 60 ppm higher than in 1996. This rise over the past quarter century is more than half that observed over Pleistocene glacial-interglacial cycles, which have occurred over many thousands of years.  Earth scientists have played a critical role in documenting these changes, along with the attendant impacts on Earth’s climate, sea-level, glacier melt, extreme weather, etc. We have also developed tools to predict what the future may hold with increasing certainty.  But this information has not been sufficient to motivate relevant societal action. As a result, we have been increasingly called to reach out directly to key audiences outside of the ivory tower, connecting directly with broad sectors of civil society.

As we have gained a deeper understanding of human impacts on Earth’s biophysical systems, we have also come to better appreciate the devastating impacts of colonialism and racism in Canada and elsewhere.  In a new era of Truth and Reconciliation, we are now called to walk together along a path of collaboration and mutual understanding, working to build new relationships built on respect and humility.  These are the challenges of today, and the challenges of tomorrow, in which each of us must step forward. 

This evening is about celebrating our past and our present, and reflecting on how our role as Earth scientists will evolve over the next 25 years, as we seek to work across disciplines and engage with the society around us.  Several of tonight’s speakers will present some reflections to guide our thoughts, and each of us will also have a role to play as the evening unfolds.  The evening is about reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, and also about building new relationships.  I encourage you to consider that as you take your seats in a few minutes – see if you can meet new people, and expand your understanding of the diversity of our department.

Before we take our seats, I’d like to acknowledge some special guests.  First, I’m delighted that we have been able to assemble all of the past Heads of the EOAS department, Bob Ellis, Paul Smith, Greg Dipple and Roger Beckie, each of whom has made many important contributions to our department.  I would also like to acknowledge Ross Beaty, an alumnus from our department in the pre-merger days.  Ross has been our greatest supporter, and his tireless efforts and generosity were critical in the construction of the Earth Sciences Building, our wonderful museum and many other facets of our department.  And last, but certainly not least, I also want to acknowledge the hard work of several EOAS graduate students who put this evening together, Eva Gnegy, Ruth Moore, Cara James, Cat Breasley and Sacchi Pillai.  They have put a huge amount of effort into planning this evening over many months. I think the results speak for themselves.   

To conclude, I would like to offer a toast to the remarkable group of individuals, past and present, who have contributed so much to EOAS over the past quarter century. I would like to acknowledge my colleagues on the EOAS faculty, who have given many years of dedicated and passionate service to this department, contributing to research, teaching, student mentoring, and to the often-tedious job of committee work.  I also salute our students and post-docs, who have been at the forefront of our research, and play a critical role in supporting teaching programs across the department.  You keep us young and constantly challenge us with new ideas.  You are the leaders of tomorrow, and the skills and knowledge you take with you from EOAS will be critical in solving some of our most important global problems.  And to our research, technical and administrative staff, you are the unsung heroes who look after our infrastructure, equipment and operations. You do your work professionally, efficiently and quietly in the background.  You manage the day to day operations of our department, allowing us to reach our full potential.  To all of these individuals, I offer my deepest gratitude and appreciation.  It has been a true honor to be part of EOAS for more than two decades, and I look forward to following our progress over the next quarter century.  Cheers!