News

This summer assistant EOAS professor Dr. Kendra Chritz is headed to the Turkana Basin in Kenya in search of ancient hominin fossils. Specifically, Dr. Chritz and her colleagues from the Lothagam Research Project are on the lookout for hominins dating back 6-10 million years, close to the time when our lineage diverged from chimpanzees. Members of the Lothagam Project will use clues contained within fossils, including morphological features and chemical isotope markers, to reconstruct the ancient climate, ecosystem, and diet of our earliest ancestors. 

The aptly named Lothagam Research Project will bring crews of local and international scientists to Lothagam, an iconic paleontological site within the Turkana Basin. As part of the East African Rift system, diverging continental plates around the Turkana Basin are splitting apart to reveal fossils that have been preserved in layers of ash and sedimentary rock for millions of years. Heavy sampling in Lothagam throughout the 1960s to the early 1990s led to an abundance of mammalian fossil discoveries, dating from 5 million years and older, the target age and location likely to yield fossil evidence of human-chimpanzee evolutionary divergence. Now, around three decades later, the paleontologists of the Lothagam Research Project are returning with the hope that 30 years of erosion have revealed more clues of the life and environment of some of the earliest hominins. 

Head to our youtube channel to hear Dr. Kendra Chritz describe her research as part of the Lothagam Project. 

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has announced their newest cohort of College of Fellows Distinguished Lecturers. EOAS Professor Dominique Weis has been selected for the academic year 2023 – 2024. Participating in the Distinguished Lecture Series is an honour bestowed on a talented and articulate sub-set of AGU Fellows who are high-profile ambassadors for AGU and the Earth and space sciences AGU represents.

You can now request Dominique to attend your institution for a one-off specialist lecture at no charge (click here).

AGU's College of Fellows Distinguished Lecture Series connects AGU Fellows, known for their exceptional scientific contributions, with students worldwide. The lectures provide a high-level synthesis of specific fields, focusing on grand challenges and societal impacts. The lectures are typically given virtually and last 45-75 minutes, including a question-and-answer period where students can interact with the speaker.

Dominique was selected by the AGU section 'Study of the Earth's Deep Interior’ and her abstract title is 'Mantle Plumes as Compositional Probes of Earth’s Interior’.

Dr. Nicole Williamson, who just graduated from EOAS this summer, has recently published a paper with her co-authors looking at changes in geological flavour across Kaua‘i. They found that the western and eastern parts of the volcano, which were mapped as a single rock unit, actually formed at different times.

Kaua‘i is the northernmost island of the Hawaiian Islands and is an interesting and unique Hawaiian volcano for a few reasons. For example, most Hawaiian volcanoes are arranged in geographic pairs – Mauna Loa and Kilauea on the big Island, Wai‘anae and Ko‘olau on O‘ahu – but Kaua‘i does not have a pair as far as we know. It is also a large volcano compared to most Hawaiian volcanoes and has an unusually large central caldera.

Dr. Nicole Williamson

From a geochemical perspective, the lavas erupted by Hawaiian volcanoes are usually dominated by one of two chemical flavours, which we call Loa and Kea after their largest representative volcanoes, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. Typically, geographically paired Hawaiian volcanoes will each erupt either Loa or Kea compositions – but not Kaua‘i! Kaua‘i actually erupts both compositions and they change from one to the other across the island (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GC008451).

Kaua'i (photo credit: Nicole Williamson)

For this current study (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00445-023-01649-w), Dr. Williamson and her team wanted to know whether the change in geochemical flavour across Kaua‘i is associated with time as well. Using a technique called argon geochronology, they dated samples that had previously been well-characterized for their chemical compositions. They found that the change in chemical composition across Kaua‘i is also associated with a change in the age of rocks across the island: the older rocks in western Kaua‘i are of the Kea flavour, whereas the younger rocks in eastern Kaua‘i are of the Loa flavour. An important outcome of this study is that previously, the lavas from west and east Kaua‘i were mapped as a single rock unit: this study suggests that they actually formed at different times and should be mapped separately.

From a big picture perspective, the Hawaiian volcanoes are formed from a heat anomaly in Earth’s interior called a mantle plume. The Hawaiian mantle plume is estimated to extend almost all the way to the Earth’s core, and studies such as this one help us on our mission to determine what exactly is melting beneath the Hawaiian volcanoes, its chemical composition, and how it is all linked to the Earth’s deep interior.

Congratulations to the Class of 2023! On May 30, we had our End of Term celebration and reception honoring our 2022-2023 graduates of the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at the Pacific Museum of Earth. In addition to 97 undergraduates, 2 M.A.Sc, 6 M.Eng, 7 M.Sc., and 10 Ph.D. students received their degrees in a range of specializations this year. 

Anne-Martine (Marti) Doucet is a Research Technician at the University of British Columbia currently working with the CarbMin laboratory supervised by Dr. Greg Dipple and Dr. Uli Mayer. Her research focuses on measuring and monitoring CO2 exchange at the sediment-atmosphere interface in natural and engineered environments that enable carbon mineralization reactions (where CO2 from the atmosphere or water reacts with cations (Ca, Mg) and precipitate a carbon mineral). She completed her Bachelor degree at the University of Ottawa in Environmental Sciences with a focus in Environmental Geochemistry and recently completed a Masters degree here at UBC in Geological Sciences supervised by Dr. Uli Mayer. In her spare time, you can catch Marti biking (on roads and mountains) and playing disc golf.

Three EOAS undergraduate students attended the Joint Annual Meeting of the Geological Association of Canada, Mineralogical Association of Canada, and Society for Geology Applied to Mineral Deposits (GAC-MAC-SGA) in Sudbury, Ontario in the past week to present original research that they conducted with graduate students and faculty at UBC.

Helen Kopystecki's presentation, entitled, "Revisiting the paleoelevation history of the central Altiplano using stable isotopes in hydrated volcanic glass from the Corque Syncline, western Bolivia", builds on her 1.5-month field work in Bolivia in 2022. Her results call into question a long-standing paradigm that the Andes were rapidly uplifted in the late Miocene. They hypothesized that since major elevation changes are recorded by all paleoelevation proxies in the Corque stratigraphic section, carbonate- and volcanic glass-based proxies should yield the same reconstructed paleoelevations. However, their data indicated that volcanic glass and carbonate may record distinct environmental signals: reconstructed paleowater δD values from volcanic glass suggests that the central Altiplano has been at near modern elevations since at least 11 Ma, contrasting with δ¹⁸O values from carbonate rapidly decrease between 10 and 6 Ma. They suggested that more work is needed to understand influences on the isotopic composition of these two common paleoelevation proxies.

Helen Kopystecki

Julia Leandro's presentation entitled, "Reconstructing Maastrichtian–modern sediment delivery to the forearc Georgia Basin using detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology" includes the results of detrital zircon geochronology from the Huntingdon Formation in southern BC. Her results provide the first absolute ages for the Huntingdon Formation near urban Vancouver. Her data showed that Huntingdon Formation is Eocene in age and that major contraction of the eastern catchment of the Georgia Basin happened between the Late Cretaceous and the Eocene. Because of Huntingdon Formation’s lack of Proterozoic grains, neither the Maastrichtian Nanaimo Group nor the source of its Proterozoic grains are a sediment source for the forearc region into the Eocene. Their data also showed that the catchment of the forearc region in the Eocene did not reach past the Coast Plutonic Belt and that the catchment’s current trans-cordilleran extent was not reached until the Holocene.

Julia Leandro

Muhammad Rafeeza presented new detrital zircon geochronology from Bolivia in his poster entitled, "Provenance of Late Cretaceous to early Neogene strata in the Camargo Syncline and implications for basin geometry in southern Bolivia," which also builds on field work in South America. His results provide confirmatory data for the existing geodynamic model while at the same time calling into question source-to-sink (fluvial) relationships between the magmatic arc and the retroarc foreland. Their detrital zircon data is consistent with coeval recycling and mixing of Eastern Cordilleran detritus and onset of Eastern Cordilleran exhumation by the Oligocene-early Miocene. Their data also provides rough timing consistent with other published studies regarding the onset of the Eastern Cordilleran orogeny and is consistent with a foreland basin extending from the Western Cordillera to the interior in the Late Cretaceous to Paleocene.

Muhammad Rafeeza