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Spotlight Productions recently featured the Pacific Museum of Earth (interview with Kirsten Hodge) for their show, Family Central on TELUS Optik. This 3.5 minute segment will air on TELUS Optik Local's video on demand platform. This great overview of the PME is a must see (only 3.5 minutes)! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcV-K4oLOcE

In an astonishing paper published today in Science, Catherine Johnson and colleagues show that Mercury's magnetic field, generated by a dynamo process in its molten iron outer core, has been in place for at least 4 billion years. Low altitude observations made by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft revealed evidence of magnetization of ancient crustal rocks on Mercury and record a magnetic field that could also have been much stronger than it is today and potentially older than Earth's field.The MESSENGER spacecraft crashed onto Mercury's last week after running out of fuel at the end of a 10 year mission. See the UBC-Press articale, the Science link, and a background Science perspective.

The Jack Henderson Prize for best M.Sc. thesis went to Tylor Ambrose and The Leopold Gelinas Medal for Best M.Sc. thesis went to Amy Ryan.

Douw Steyn assists Delhi community air quality analysis effort in comparing Delhi and Beijing. Hindustan Times article

'The Billings Medal, established by the Paleontology Division of the Geological Association of Canada, is awarded to an individual in recognition of an outstanding long-term contribution to any aspect of Canadian paleontology or by a Canadian to paleontology. The Medal is named in honor of Elkanah Billings, Canada's first paleontologist'.

In a remarkable paper published on April 6, 2015 in Nature Geoscience ( http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2407.html), Garry Clarke, Valentina Radic and colleagues show that mountain glaciers in western Canada could shrink by 70% relative to 2005 levels by the end of the century as a result of global warming. The team built a novel high-resolution model that includes ice dynamics and then ran it with a series of climate scenarios covering the twenty-first century. The model suggests that few glaciers in the Canadian Rocky Mountains will persist by 2100, although glaciers in the coastal range of northwest British Columbia could survive "in a diminished state". The team predicts that changes in runoff from the melting glaciers over the course of the century could affect aquatic ecosystems, agriculture, forests, water quality and tourism.