NEWS SPOTLIGHT

EOAS Ph.D. Candidate Cara B. G. James, whose research focuses on the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining, published an article in The Conversation yesterday examining the growing push to mine the deep ocean for critical minerals and the international rules meant to govern it.

The article explains how a recent United States executive order could mean the U.S. will start issuing permits to mine in international waters outside the United Nations framework. It also outlines the criticism this move has drawn from other countries for breaking the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Using the case of a Vancouver-based company’s U.S. subsidiary applying for a permit to mine the seabed, Cara considers the potential legal and political implications for Canada, including the significance of the Canadian federal government’s position on deep-sea mining.

Read the full article here: Mining companies may soon bypass UN rules and mine the deep sea

EOSC 328 Field Geology began as usual with “Bootcamp”, a 2-day refresher on campus. Then, the 30 students boarded a bus for the trip to the Oliver region of the Okanagan with geology stops on the way. Once arrived, they settled into their new home for the next three weeks at the UBC –Teck Geological Field Station.

The instructional team this year included faculty (Ken Hickey, James Scoates, Joel Saylor, Matt Tarling) and students (Dylan Spence, Liva Hougaard, Zoe Lynn, Benjamin Johnstone). Our new critical minerals specialist, Cassady Harraden, helped out in the final week as the students started wrapping up their final map area and began focusing on preparation of their compilation maps and cross sections. And Lindsay Nelson, Educational Field & Laboratory Coordinator in EOAS, also joined us for the final week both in the field and at the field station.

The Okanagan weather had a few surprises in store for us this year! During the first two weeks, it was toasty warm (upper 20s, low 30s), but suddenly shifted to cooler temperatures (14-20°C) in the final week, rained continuously on Helipad Ridge day, and even hailed late one afternoon as everyone was walking out.

Spirits remained high throughout the duration of field school (no hammers were lost!), the UBC – Teck Geological Field Station, including the Peter and Maggie Bradshaw Experiential Learning Centre and C. Fipke Foundation Dining Hall, continued to be an impressive venue for teaching and learning, and a newly installed weather station gave us real-time data and forecasting for daily mapping activities.

Article written by James Scoates

A mineral newly approved by the International Mineralogical Association (IMA) has been named in recognition of Dr. Maya G. Kopylova, Professor in EOAS and Junior Norman Keevil Chair in Mineral Exploration, celebrating her contributions to diamond research.

Kopylovite was identified by Dr. Nester Korolev of the American Museum of Natural History and colleagues from tiny inclusions preserved inside diamonds from the Sloan kimberlite pipes in the Wyoming Craton, USA. Formed in the upper mantle from a few dozen to about 200 kilometers beneath the surface, it contains titanium and potassium—elements commonly associated with rocks in Earth’s crust—and has been proposed to record the recycling of sediments into the mantle in subduction zones at the top of oceanic crust. 

The mineral is notable not only for what it reveals about Earth’s deep interior, but also for its place in the broader history of mineral nomenclature. A study in 2024 found that only 2.8% of nearly 6,000 mineral names are named after women, making this recognition especially inspiring within the field of mineralogy. Kopylovite is named in honour of Dr. Maya G. Kopylova and her father, Gerzen Kopylov, a Russian physicist, poet and political dissident. Dr. Kopylova leads the Diamond Exploration Laboratory, which conducts petrological and mineralogical investigations of kimberlites, mantle xenoliths, and diamonds to unravel the structure, thermal regime, and processes of the diamond-bearing upper mantle. The lab’s fundamental research in mantle petrology also has direct, practical applications in diamond exploration.

Kopylovite is not the only recently IMA-designated mineral with an EOAS connection. Raudseppite was identified from the Gun claim, southeast of Itsi Lakes in Yukon, Canada, by former Master’s student Mary Macquistan, her supervisor Dr. Lee A. Groat, Professor in EOAS, and their colleagues. Raudseppite is named after Dr. Mati Raudsepp, who served for more than three decades as Director of the Electron Microbeam/X-Ray Diffraction Facility and held appointments as Research Associate and Honorary Professor in EOAS. Through his world-class expertise in quantitative X-ray powder diffraction, Dr. Raudsepp supported both fundamental research and industry needs and trained generations of graduate students in data collection and analysis.

Read the full UBC Science article here: Even after adopting cattle, early herders kept hunting and gathering 

Dr. Kendra Chritz, Geochemist and Assistant Professor in EOAS, and a team of international collaborators have contributed new insights into the diets and lifeways of the earliest herders in eastern Africa, revealing that people continued hunting, fishing, and gathering long after adopting livestock. The study, recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), helps fill a major gap in understanding how early food production developed during a period of rapid environmental change. 

The research focused on early herder communities living in the Turkana Basin, primarily located within modern Kenya and Ethiopia, of roughly 5,000 years ago. By analysing carbon isotopes preserved in human tooth enamel, the team reconstructed ancient diets and found that these early herders maintained highly varied food sources despite keeping cattle, sheep, and goats. “Rather than relying entirely on those livestock, they still maintained a really variable diet, like the fisher-foragers that came before them,” says Dr. Chritz.

The findings suggest that dietary flexibility may have helped these communities adapt to major climatic shifts occurring at the time, including rapid drying and dramatic lake-level decline in the region. The work also highlights the importance of eastern Africa in the broader history of food production and human adaptation. “It fills in this record that was missing for a really long period of time and gives us this more holistic picture of how people might have coped with large-scale environmental changes in prehistory,” shared Dr. Chritz.  

The project brought together an international group of archaeologists, geochemists, and collaborators from the National Museums of Kenya, building on more than a decade of partnership and field research. Alongside the dietary analysis, the team also worked to carefully document and consolidate museum collections to reduce unnecessary repeat sampling of human remains and support long-term stewardship of the collections. 

The Wheaton Walk Through Time, an outdoor interpretive exhibit along the southeast side of the Earth Sciences Building, has received an Award of Excellence from the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects. 

Completed in 2022, the exhibit transforms the pedestrian route between the Pacific Museum of Earth and the Beaty Biodiversity Museum into a 110-metre linear timeline through 4.5 billion years of Earth history. The installation presents geological and biological change in 100-million-year intervals, helping visitors experience the scale of geological time and key evolutionary milestones as they walk between the museums. Ending with the Tree of Life at the entrance of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, the exhibit highlights the connection between biodiversity, evolution, and Earth’s changing environments, while underpinning the value of collaboration between earth and ecological sciences. 

Designed by PWL Partnership Landscape Architects Inc., the project was lauded for its ability to communicate “complex geological and biological concepts through spatial sequencing, materiality, colour and form.” The award recognises the exhibit’s success in turning scientific research and museum interpretation into an accessible public learning experience.

EOAS congratulates everyone involved in bringing the project to life, from the original 2014 concept proposed by Tara Ivanochko and Stuart Sutherland during the early planning of the Earth Sciences Building, through the multi-year design and development process from 2018–2022. This included leadership from Kirsten Hodge and the Pacific Museum of Earth team in shaping the interpretive experience, in close collaboration with the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, PWL Partnership Landscape Architects, EOAS, and the Faculty of Science Development Office. EOAS also gratefully acknowledges the support of Wheaton Precious Metals, whose contribution made the Wheaton Walk Through Time possible. 

In the Prairie Potholes region, spanning the southern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba prairies, water doesn’t go straight from precipitation and snowmelt to streamflow, its first intercepted and stored by millions of small but densely located wetlands. When a wetland fills up it switches from storing to releasing water. In a system with millions of these wetlands, a sudden switch can have intense effects on downstream river conditions.  

New research from Javad Rahmani (PhD Candidate) and Dr. Ali Ameli (EOAS Assistant Professor), and collaborators at the University of Toronto and Ducks Unlimited, published in Nature Communications,  Earth & Environment, confirms that these wetlands play a central role in determining how much rain and snowmelt becomes streamflow, with implications for flood and drought preparedness and vulnerability, and the regional ecosystem’s water balance. Using 38 years of satellite-based hydrologic maps the authors show that the intercepting role of the wetlands means that the same rainfall or snowmelt event can produce very different streamflow depending on how full the wetland network already is. Small increases in wetland storage can trigger large changes in runoff if the wetlands were already pretty full, or a large rainfall can have no impacts if they were empty, but the relationship is not uniform throughout the Prairie potholes regions.  

The expanse of the region and immense number of wetlands means that modelling every wetland is impossible – the necessary information often doesn’t exist even if there was enough time and resources for millions of models. A study by Rahmani, Ameli, and coauthor Chaopeng Shen at the University of Pennsylvania published in Water Resources Research, tackles this problem: how do we predict wetland outflow behaviour where streamflow gauges and detailed wetland inventories are sparse? Rahmani and co-authors developed a physics-informed deep learning model to combine what data was available with the principles of how wetlands store, release, and connect water. Applied across catchments, the model predicted streamflow and pothole water storage more accurately and consistently than purely data-driven approaches, allowing for reliable predictions to be made in ungauged watersheds.  

This research highlights the risks involved in Alberta’s new wetland policy, which came into effect in March and exempts farmers from wetland preservation rules if the wetland is only filled seasonally based on a 17-week cutoff. This seasonal cutoff is a concern for Dr. Ameli, who argues that these seasonally dry wetlands are those with the highest buffering capacity, meaning that if you remove them, you may be increasing downstream flood risks dramatically. “A fixed 17-week cutoff ignores the fact that the same pothole that holds water for 8 weeks in a dry year may hold water for 22 weeks in a wet year,” explained Ameli, “once cultivated through in a dry year, it cannot buffer the wet year when it matters most.”