News

The Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences held its annual Welcome Back BBQ last week and announced our well deserving award winners! Check out the list below and be sure to congratulate them!

EOAS Award for Excellence in Administration and Technical Services: Kimberly Low and Sara Jenkins

EOAS Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award: The 442 trio of Thomas Aubrey, Natalie Mahara and Manuel Columno

EOAS Undergraduate Instructors of the Year: Sara Harris and Stuart Sutherland

EOAS Leadership and Service Award: Greg Dipple

The Pacific Centre for Isotopic and Geochemical Research (PCIGR) was pleased to host the Canadian Minister of National Defence, Harjit Sajjan, for a tour of its nUBC facility. The Minister was on campus on behalf of the Minister of Science, Kirsty Duncan, to announce more than $42 million in funding to support fundamental research at UBC through the NSERC 2017 competition for the Discovery Grants program, scholarships, and fellowships. CFI and BC-KDF grants supported the construction of the PCIGR laboratory facilities and a recent NSERC RTI grant contributes to its ongoing operations.
 
The nUBC laboratory is classified as a clean room, a very specialized environment designed to reduce contamination. Because contamination can be brought in by people and their clothing, everyone entering the lab was required follow a strict gowning protocol.
 
The tour was led by PCIGR Director, Professor Dominique Weis, with assistance from her unique team of research staff and graduate students. The Honorable Minister was accompanied by, Professor Gail Murphy, UBC Vice-President Research, and Enikö Megyeri-Lawless, NSERC Director of Research Grants, Engineering and Life Sciences. Many of the features and instruments in the lab were showcased, with a focus on the Nu1700 high-resolution multi-collector ICP-MS. The first of its kind in Canada, this instrument is particularly remarkable due to its large size and unique components, including a >4-tonne magnet. Of particular interest to the Minister, it is the same type of instrument used in the military to analyze sources of uranium (depleted or enriched).
 
Another highlight of the tour was the RESOlution M-50-LR, operated by PCIGR research associate, Dr. Marghaleray Amini. The instrument is a laser ablation system, coupled to an ICP-MS, which can ablate a wide range of geological and environmental materials at high resolution and low absorbance.  Near the end of the tour, PCIGR graduate students Rhy McMillan, Kate Smith, Jamie Cutts, and Anais Fourny, and postdoctoral fellow, Miling Li, had the opportunity to briefly explain their research to the Minister. Their projects speak to the great diversity of research that is enabled by PCIGR’s instruments and staff.   
 
In conclusion, the tour was a great opportunity to showcase why PCIGR is a world-class geochemical facility. Thank you to the Minister and to everyone who joined us!

For a detailed photographic report of the event from UBC photographer Paul Joseph, see UBC Public Affairs album.

UBC Alumnus Dick Culbert sadly passed away on May 23^rd, 2017. He earned his Ph.D. in geophysics at UBC in 1971 and was a prominent explorer and mountaineer in British Columbia. He is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest mountaineers/explorers in BC and used his knowledge to write numerous climbing guides to the Coastal Range.

A memorial will take place at the Beaty Biodiversity museum on Oct 7^th, 2017 starting at 5:00.

http://www.inmemoriam.ca/view-announcement-2266592-richard-dick-revis-culbert.html

Researchers from EOAS and Universität Bern (Switzerland) discovered a possible link between the long-term evolution of Earth’s crust and the emergence of Earth’s oxygen cycle 3.0 billion years ago.

Cyanobacteria may have produced O₂ as early as 3.7 billion years ago. Still, it took almost a billion years for that O₂ to start accumulating in the shallow oceans and, subsequently, the atmosphere during a period commonly called the Great Oxidation Event (2.4-2.2 Gyr ago). The slow and stepwise rise of  O₂ in Earth’s atmosphere has always been somewhat of a mystery. Links to the changing composition of continents at the time have been proposed. However, with clear constraints on the average composition of the continents lacking, these links have been difficult to elucidate.

Research professors Matthijs A. Smit of EOAS and Klaus Mezger of Universität Bern, decided to approach this problem by letting nature do the sampling. They analyzed the Cr/U chemistry of land-sourced sediments, working from the idea that these rocks sample large areas of the exposed continents and thus may provide a good representation of their average composition.

Their research revealed a staggering change in continental composition between 3.0-2.4 billion years ago. Before this period, the continents were much more rich in Mg and poorer in Si than today, and contained Mg-rich minerals such as olivine. Present-day analogues show that hydration of such mafic crust causes local surface waters to have extremely high pH and high concentrations of O₂ scavengers such as methane and dihydrogen. Although rare today, such reducing waters must have been common before 3.0 Gyr ago. Ultimately, it may have been the removal of Earth’s primitive proto-continents and the cleansing of the environment from O₂ scavengers, which set System Earth on track towards having an oxygenated and habitable environment conducive to the evolution of higher life forms.

The findings are among the first reported from a new interdisciplinary research program on the formation and evolution of Earth’s earliest continents. In this program, lead-PI Smit and his students use the world-leading analytical facilities at PCIGR to analyze relics of Archean continental crust found in Canada, Greenland, India, South Africa and elsewhere.

Follow the link for more info: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo3030.html

Congratulations to Professor Roger Francois on his election as Fellow of the American Geophysical Union! Dr. Francois holds a Canada Reseach Chair in Marine Biogeochemistry and Climate Change Studies. Roger's election as FAGU honours his research on application of geochemistry to problems of paleoceanography, with particular emphasis on late Quaternary paleoceanography, radiochemical approaches, carbon and nitrogen isotope geochemistry, trace element proxies and abyssal water circulation. The award  is a great distinction as only 0.1% of AGU membership receives this recognition in any given year. The 2017 class of Fellows will be inducted during the Honors Tribute on Wednesday, 13 December, held during the 2017 AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans. Read more on the 2017 FAGU at https://news.agu.org/press-release/american-geophysical-union-announces-2017-fellows/. 

Dr. Francois is the fifth AGU Fellow from the EOAS Department. 

EOAS Professor Scott McDougall was recently interviewed by the Canadian Science Publishing Blog regarding his current research in landslide modeling and analysis. This coincides with his review paper published in the Canadian Geotechnical Journal where he describes the state-of-practice in landslide runout analysis along with some of the current limitations in modern methodology.

To read the interview, follow this link: http://www.cdnsciencepub.com/blog/forecasting-the-impacts-of-extremely-rapid-landslides.aspx