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Davi holds a Bachelor's and Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES, Brazil), and is also an alumnus of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he studied for two semesters through the Sciences Without Borders program. At the University of British Columbia, Davi is a Ph.D. Student in Atmospheric Sciences, at the Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS), supervised by Dr. Naomi Zimmerman. He received the President’s Academic Excellence Award, the W.H. Mathew scholarship, and the 4 Year Doctoral Fellowship. His work aims to investigate the air quality impacts of the emerging cannabis industry and explore the links between odours, air quality, and health.

The 2023 EOAS Department Poster Corral took place on April 5th and 6th and a number of graduate and undergraduate posters were displayed in the atrium of the Earth Sciences Building. This has been the first in-person poster corral since 2019, and a wide diversity of work going on across EOAS was shown.

Congrats to the winners!

1st Place: Jasmine Chase

2nd Place: Dr. Colin Rowell

3rd Place: Alexis Bahl

Public-vote undergraduate poster: Rachel Webb

Public-vote graduate poster: Eva Gnegy

Jasmine Chase

Dr. Colin Rowell

Alexis Bahl

Rachel Webb

UBC Science

Material left on the seafloor by bronze-age underwater volcanic eruptions is helping researchers better understand the size, hazards and climate impact of their parent eruptions, according to new research from the University of British Columbia.

Roughly 3,600 years ago, the eruption of a semi-submerged volcano in the southern Aegean Sea devastated the island of Santorini, injecting ash, rocks and gas into the atmosphere and depositing kilometres of sediment in terraces on the seafloor.

The catastrophic eruption, and others like it, have traditionally been associated with abrupt climate shifts. But the minor climate impacts of more recent underwater volcanic eruptions, like that of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in 2022, have put that theory in doubt.

Now a multi-year study of ancient Santorini volcano deposits is unravelling the nature of these massive caldera-forming eruptions, and providing new clues as to how future eruptions might impact Earth’s climate.

During massive eruptions, volcanic eruption columns pass through shallow seas as jets of ash, rocks and gases that rise tens of kilometres into the atmosphere. But exactly how, and how much, of that material is then delivered to the sea surface or ground has remained unclear.

“We’ve proved the architecture of volcanic deposits in subaerial and submarine settings can be used to quantitatively constrain the dynamics of the eruption that occurred there, including the vent source and environmental conditions,” said University of British Columbia (UBC) researcher Dr. Johan Gilchrist, lead author the study published in Nature Geoscience (scroll down to watch our interview with Dr. Gilchrist).

“The study also provides crucial lower bounds on eruption strength, jet heights and frequencies and sizes of the sedimentation waves linked to terraced deposits. That will help us predict the evolution of hazards during these caldera-forming eruptions and understand the surprisingly small climate impact of similar events.”

With UBC Earth and planetary scientist Dr. Mark Jellinek, Dr. Gilchrist analyzed the concentric terraces that remain around the Santorini caldera—historically called the Minoan eruption. They discovered that the terrace widths decrease with increasing distance from the vent, and slope backwards up towards the caldera wall, consistent with other terraced caldera deposits. The terraces near the caldera wall are also much broader than those found in caldera from purely submarine or subaerial eruptions.

Dr. Gilchrist had a hunch that sedimentation waves collapsing periodically around the volcanic jet spread where they impacted the water surface during shallow submarine eruptions.

To verify the hypothesis, the researchers injected particles into shallow water layers to mimic the submarine Minoan eruption. The experiments proved the descending sedimentation waves caused by shallow water eruptions can impact and spread at the sea surface to create tsunamis and also scour the seafloor, depending on the eruption strength and water depth.

The terraced deposits left a fingerprint outlining what happened during the eruption, the size of the sedimentation waves, and how they interacted with the water and seafloor.

“The limits this study has uncovered will guide a next generation of hydrovolcanic climate models aimed at understanding how the mass partitioning properties of eruptions like Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai—as well as the largest and most impressive volcanic phenomena in the geological record—minimize their effects on climate change,” said Dr. Jellinek.

Added Dr. Gert Lube, a volcanologist with Massey University not involved in the study: "For the case of three submarine caldera-forming eruptions, this study provides the first direct relationships between the deposit architecture and parental eruption conditions. The results of this study are intriguing and could possibly be extended to non-marine, caldera-forming and smaller eruption events.”

Read the paper here: Submarine terraced deposits linked to periodic collapse of caldera-forming eruption columns

Watch our interview with Dr. Johan Gilchrist: 

Dave Daquioag is a research technician for the Pacific Centre for Isotopic and Geochemical Research at the University of British Columbia where he assists students and researchers with isotopic analysis of their samples. His main tasks include the separation and purification of radiogenic isotopes from whole rock or mineral samples using ion exchange column chemistry and the analysis of Sr isotopes with the Nu Instruments Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer (Nu TIMS). He completed his BSc in chemistry at UBC and has past experience working in different industrial lab settings from characterizing surfactant material to analyzing potash minerals.

Professor Philippe Tortell​, Head of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, told us a wonderful story from his trip to Antarctica. It is a story about the ocean, curiosity, and science. Watch the video below to learn about it!

Here's another video about their trip to Antarctica: https://youtu.be/UDAsGSvsOAU

Darius Kamal, a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Ken Hickey at EOAS, has been selected as a recipient of SRK Canada’s Graduate Scholarship for the 2022/23 academic year. This scholarship was established to encourage and support post-graduate studies in fields related to the mining industry. Applicants are evaluated based on their academic achievement, industry experience and the relevance of their studies to the mining industry. 

Darius’ Ph.D. research aims to establish how rock deformation during crustal shortening events impacts the distribution, preservation, and grade of sediment-hosted massive sulfide (SHMS) Zn-Pb deposits. His research is focused on the SHMS deposits at Howard’s Pass and Macmillan Pass in eastern Yukon. Darius’s study integrates lithostratigraphic and structural mapping with kinematic and microstructural analysis, U-Pb carbonate dating of veins, whole rock geochemistry, mineral chemistry, and micro-XRF, SEM, and EBSD mapping. Darius’s research will make a significant contribution not only to the structural development of the Selwyn basin and the tectonic evolution of the Canadian cordillera, but also to the mineral system science of SHMS deposits. 

Read more stories about Darius here and here.