News
Stay up-to-date with what's happening in EOAS
Congratulations to 2024 AGU Fellow, Dr. Doug Oldenburg
Dr. Douglas Oldenburg, emeritus Professor in Earth Oceans and Atmospheric Sciences and founder of the UBC Geophysical Inversion Facility, joins the 2024 AGU Fellowship Cohort for 2024. The AGU Fellowship is a prestigious award that recognizes excellence in Earth and Planetary Sciences. Dr. Douglas Oldenburg has contributed greatly to the field by developing inversion methods and applications to solve diverse geophysical problems.
In addition to the 2024 AGU Fellowship, Dr. Douglas Oldenburg has won numerous other awards for teaching and research. He is a recognized Fellow of the Royal Society, SEG Honorary Membership Recipient, and TeckCominco Senior Keevil Chair in Mineral Exploration. He is passionate about teaching and making geophysics accessible to all and has developed a number of open-source resources for students and educators of geophysics (available here).
Congratulations to Dr. Oldenburg on this latest well deserved achievement.
Earth’s mantle is less of a mosaic and more of a homogenous soup
Around the world, lavas erupting from volcanic hotpots have unique chemical compositions. Lava plumes in Hawaii, Iceland, and Samoa each have a distinct chemical signature. Conventional wisdom led researchers to believe these chemical signatures reflected the chemistry of their underlying mantle source, implying the mantle has a mosaic-like structure of variable chemical composition. However, new research led by Dr. Matthijs Smit, Associate professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia’s Dept. of Earth Oceans and Atmospheric Sciences, tells a very different story. The research, published in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience, finds that the mantle is actually quite uniform and differences in chemical composition between hotspot plumes develop as emerging magma interacts with different overlying rock types. In a way, hotspot lavas are much like varieties of soup with different ingredients, but made from the same stock.
The breakthrough article titled “A common precursor for global hotspot lavas” re-envisions our understanding of Earth’s mantle and provides us with new insights into the global cycle of elements, our planet’s formation and the evolution of the mantle. Previously, models of the mantle had to include ‘primordial reservoirs’ to be able to explain some of the chemical data. However, these geographically isolated pools clashed with our understanding of global mantle convection. The new paradigm offers a simple explanation for the observations aligned with mantle convection theories. A chemically uniform mantle with magma that is transformed during its rise to the surface can also explain the vast difference between oceanic and continental basalts, including diamond bearing kimberlites.
Together with co-author Dr. Ellen Kooijman of the Swedish Museum of Natural History’s Department of Geosciences, Dr. Smit analyzed the trace-element and isotope composition of hotspot lavas from oceanic hotspots around the world. The chemical tracers revealed the melts all had highly consistent source material. Without being able to directly sample the Earth’s mantle, these lava samples offer us the closest glimpse of the magma stew below us.
Click here to read more about Dr. Smit and Dr. Kooijman’s findings in their own words and find the original research article here.
Dr. Mark Jellinek elected as an AGU Fellow
Dr. Mark Jellinek, Professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, was elected as an AGU Fellow, joining a distinguished group of 54 individuals in the 2024 Class of Fellows. AGU is the world's largest Earth and space science association and AGU Fellows are bestowed annually to a select number of individuals who have made exceptional contributions. Since its inception in 1962, less than 0.1% of AGU members have been selected as Fellows each year.
AGU Fellows are recognized for their scientific eminence, demonstrated through breakthroughs, discoveries or innovations that advance the Earth and space sciences. Fellows act as external experts, advising government agencies and other organizations outside the sciences upon request. Dr. Jellinek was selected for their exemplary leadership and outstanding scientific achievements, which have significantly advanced our understanding of various topics, including magmatic and volcanic processes and hazards, geodynamics, long-term climate change, surface processes and the evolution of Earth and other rocky planets.
Learn more about Dr. Jellinek and his research:
Our oceans are choking. What can we learn from ancient deoxygenation events?
During the lifetime of most of UBC’s tenured faculty, the oceans have lost more than 2% of their oxygen content and are projected to lose another 10% during the coming century. As water temperatures rise with climate change, oxygen becomes less soluble and is outgassed from the oceans. Around the world the range of anoxic waters, areas severely depleted of oxygen, are spreading and have quadrupled in volume since the 1960s. These anoxic areas, or ‘dead zones’, are associated with massive die-offs of marine life. To gain greater understanding of the fate of our oceans today, researchers are turning to deoxygenation events of the past.
Last week, new research by UBC graduate Kohen Bauer, supervised by Sean Crowe of the Department of Earth Oceans and Atmospheric Science, examined a widespread ocean deoxygenation event that occurred ~120 million years ago during the early Cretaceous period. Their research ‘A climate threshold for ocean deoxygenation during the early Cretaceous’ published in Nature details how a volcanic event increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations enough to tip climate thresholds and induce rapid warming and corresponding ocean deoxygenation. Ocean redox chemistry of that time, preserved in rock cores the team was able to analyze, reveals that it took up to a million years for the Earth system to recover. The ocean was persistently anoxic until silicate weathering gradually brought pCO2 levels down enough that the climate crossed back over the critical threshold for ocean oxygenation. Silicate weathering removes carbon from the atmosphere and increases under warmer temperatures, acting as a negative feedback to climate warming. However, it is still a very slow process, especially compared with CO2 injection rates due to volcanic events or human emissions.
The implication of this new research is that once ocean anoxia is onset recovery will be an incredibly slow process if relying on natural carbon sinks. The research suggests the critical climate threshold of the past was surpassed when pCO2 levels reached 2,000 ppm, five times today’s pCO2 levels, implying there is still some time to act before we reach the same turning point.
Click here to read the original research article.
EOAS Researchers Investigate Invasive Jellyfish Multiplying by the Thousands in B.C. Waters
A recent study done by Dr. Florian Lüskow and Dr. Evgeny Pakhomov from the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences (EOAS) and Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (IOF), University of British Columbia (UBC), revealed the growing presence of the invasive peach blossom jellyfish in British Columbia (B.C.) waters, marking its furthest northern reach in North America. Read the UBC News article: Thousands of jellyfish clones are multiplying in B.C. lakes
The jellyfish, an introduced jellyfish species from China, has been reported with 85 sightings in BC in the last 34 years. However, Dr. Lüskow and Dr. Pakhomov predicted about 80 sightings for this decade alone and in more locations than currently observed as climate change warms the freshwater bodies of B.C. “If climate change leads to freshwater temperature increases across B.C., we will likely see wider spread. Modelling indicates that even Alaskan reservoirs may potentially see invasion,” said Dr. Pakhomov.
Though harmless to humans, this jellyfish's ecological impact on indigenous species is largely unknown. A silver lining is that only genetically identical male jellyfish have been found, meaning the species cannot reproduce sexually, limiting its ability to adapt to new environments.
Dr. Lüskow and Dr. Pakhomov plan to map the peach blossom jellyfish's actual distribution and better quantify its impact on freshwater ecosystems using environmental DNA. They would also like to know wherever the jellyfish occur, so if you spot a peach blossom jellyfish, feel free to submit a report to iNaturalist, the Invasive Species Council of BC, or to them directly.
Life at the Edge - The Pacific Museum of Earth's newest permanent exhibit
Scenes from the Late Cretaceous, the era of the dinosaurs, have come back to life within the Wheaton Precious Metals Atrium of the Earth Sciences Building (ESB) on the University of British Columbia campus. The new exhibit, Life at the Edge, curated by the Pacific Museum of Earth takes visitors back 75 million years to life at the edge of Earth’s fifth and most recent mass extinction event. Visitors to ESB can see a Daspletosaurus, an ancestor of the iconic T-Rex, chasing down a smaller carnivorous raptor, the Dromaeosaurus.
The exhibit has been designed to provoke thoughts on the precarious, yet resilient nature of life on Earth. Similar to the dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous, we now face rapid climate change that many predict will bring us to the edge of the 6th mass extinction event. While the exhibit draws parallels between the current Anthropocene and Late Cretaceous, it also highlights important differences. The 5th mass extinction event at the end of the Late Cretaceous was initiated by unstoppable natural disasters. Whereas current increasing extinction rates are due to anthropogenic carbon emissions, land use change like deforestation, and resource extraction. While we may not be able to prevent all the consequences of climate change, we still have the power to adjust our activities to minimize consequences and adapt to change. The exhibit curators hope by highlighting these differences, visitors will feel empowered to initiate conversations within their own communities and take actions where they can.
The exhibit will open to the public on July 2. In the meantime, children at the University of British Columbia’s daycare program had an exclusive sneak peek of the dinosaurs as fossil articulators assembled the fossil casts. Their visit was covered by Vancouver CTV News. Several other media outlets have been quick to cover the new exhibit that hosts the first and only tyrannosaur on UBC’s campus. See below for a full list of Life on the Edge media coverage. Huge thanks to Wheaton Precious Metals whose generous gift made this new exhibit come to life.
Media coverage:
1. CTV News
2. CTV News Vancouver (9:50 mark)
3. Glacier Media via Vancouver is Awesome, Burnaby Now, Richmond News, Tri-City News, New Westminster Record, North Shore News, Squamish Chief, Delta Optimist, Times Colonist, Coast Reporter
4. Vancouver Sun via MSN