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As part of a $37.8 million Climate Action and Awareness Fund, the Government of Canada is investing $6 million toward a youth-focused climate change project, coined GenAction, led by science centres and museums across Canada.

The Pacific Museum of Earth has joined 28 Canadian Association of Science Centres’ (CASC) members including GenAction project leaders, the Discovery Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Science North in Sudbury, Ontario, and The Exploration Place in Prince George, British Columbia. The collective goal is to use the funds to create and deliver GenAction climate change engagement programs, targeting youth in every province and territory in Canada.

GenAction climate change programming, such as school programs, camps, outreach, and other hands-on locally relevant activities, aims to help youth understand current and credible climate change science, transform their thinking, and inspire them to take action. The goal of GenAction programming is to reach 200,000 kindergarten to grade 12 youth and more than 5,000 Indigenous youth in their communities, with a focus on affecting daily actions that will collectively contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

In addition, the Pacific Museum of Earth has partnered with Steamlabs.ca and ECOSchools Canada to create a Virtual Climate Escape Room.

With a reach of over 10 million visitors annually, CASC member science centres and museums play an important role in teaching youth to be critical thinkers and change makers on important issues like climate change.  This contemporary immersive game format will synthesize the knowledge learned throughout the climate program and task groups to “escape” from climate change. Students will use critical-thinking and collaboration skills to solve a series of puzzles encoded in the room’s artifacts that communicate basic concepts of climate change/action in order to escape within a set period of time (45 - 60 minutes). Upon escaping from the game students will make a climate pledge for what climate action they will adopt in their daily life.

“we are thrilled to be a part of this national climate education movement" says the Museum's Director, Dr. Kirsten Hodge, "Our program will fill a critical piece in B.C’s K-12 science curriculum and will allow students to interact directly with climate scientists at UBC.”

Greg Dipple, Bethany Ladd and Peter Scheuermann

“We unlock the enormous carbon dioxide removal potential of mine waste. Our technology will enable mines to become massive carbon sinks, while producing the metals needed to drive the clean energy transition.” – Carbin Minerals

UBC spin-off Carbin Minerals has won the $1million Milestone prize from the Carbon Removal Xprize, administered by the Musk Foundation.

Carbin Minerals have developed proprietary technologies to speed up the natural process of rocks absorbing CO2 from the air, cutting time from millennia to months. Working with mines, the company has committed to removing 1000 tonnes of atmospheric CO2 by 2024 and demonstrated a pathway to removing mega and giga tonnes in the future.

As Dipple said on CBC, being named as one of 15 winners out of an initial 1,133 entrants, all judged by a panel of 70 experts and scientists from across the globe, is a valuable endorsement for Carbin Minerals Inc. and its future. "It allows us to really accelerate our R&D and technology development and also the deployment of it. We're working hard right now to place this technology out in the field and start working."

The long-term goal of Carbin Minerals is to remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as possible, storing it safely and durably as rock, as Ladd said in a Q&A with UBC Science. “There is an enormous amount of carbon removal potential laying dormant in mine waste around the world, and it is only going to increase as the world’s demand for critical metals grows to supply the clean energy transition. We are working to unlock that potential so we can tangibly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and truly turn the dial on climate change.”

Rocks and materials at one of Carbin Minerals Inc.'s carbon removal research sites at a legacy mine located in the Western U.S. (photo: Bethany Ladd)

Daniel Adria is a MASc student in Geological Engineering within the EOAS department at UBC, under Dr. Scott McDougall in the Geohazards Research Team. He is investigating tailings dam failures and their subsequent runout characteristics, to reduce uncertainties in risk assessments and emergency planning for mine projects and communities. Daniel completed his bachelor degree in civil engineering at UBC and worked in the consulting industry for a few years before returning to academia. When not modelling a tailings dam failure on a computer, Daniel can be often found outside, either skiing, sailing, or hiking throughout the south west coast of BC.

The day after Russia invaded Ukraine, UBC Professor Evgeny Pakhomov (Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, IOF and the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, EOAS), chief scientist for the Pan-Pacific Winter High Seas Expedition, set sail on a Russian research vessel to study salmon in the North Pacific. 

As a native Russian speaker with family in Ukraine, Dr. Pakhomov was onboard to take zooplankton, fish, and oceanographic samples and to train young Russian scientists. On day two, a message arrived that the ship was to return to Russia – the expedition was cancelled. Now, the question became just how to get Dr. Pakhomov and scientific samples home safely. Over the next three weeks, expedition organizers worked through multiple time zones and levels of bureaucracy to find a solution: Russian authorities were nervous about the ship entering American waters to drop him off, no ships would come to pick him up, and returning to Vladivostok would likely mean losing the majority of the collected samples – and Dr. Pakhomov entering a country at war. The only thing he could do was concentrate on getting the science done. Of the approximately 90 stations due to be sampled, the researchers managed to sample about 32, gathering valuable data for the more than a dozen projects involved.

Almost a week after he was due back, and just a few days before the ship would have to head back to Russia due to low fuel, a private company agreed to sail out of American waters to rendezvous with the Russian vessel, to the tune of about $16,000. In about 20 minutes, Dr. Pakhomov was onboard, with samples in tow, and soon back in Dutch Harbor, “I’ve never been so happy to step onto American soil.”

Listen to the CBC Radio Quirks and Quarks where Dr. Pakhomov shared his experience on board a Russian research ship amidst the Russo-Ukrainian War. 

To learn more about how Dr. Pakhomov navigated uncertainty amid Ukraine invasion on board of the Russian research ship, read the article by The Globe and Mail.

Check out the IOF news article to learn more about the 2022 Salmon Pan-Pacific Winter High Seas Expedition.

For the past six months, members of the EOAS department have been working closely with UBC’s School of Music on the collaborative project, “Sounds of Earth”. Catalyzed by a visit from the quintet Axiom Brass in October 2021, graduate students and researchers came together with a student composer and group of student musicians to create a piece expressive of their research. For many, it was an entirely new way of communicating science.

“I’m used to communicating one on one with audiences, so this experience has definitely been different” says Ruth Moore, working with fellow scientist Rachel White and composer Ben Ledocohwski on a piece entitled “Three Degrees”. The pair’s collaboration garnered media coverage in national and local news outlets. Ruth, an MSc student, studies polar amplification and focuses on changes that global warming causes on the hydrological cycle in the Arctic. “Music is one of the most emotive art forms, in my opinion, and it has been really fun” she reflects “but also challenging, thinking of ways in which we can use music and science together to bring forward a message about climate change.”

Communicating through music helped some groups express the heightened stakes of climate affects like glacial retreat, as heard in “Glacial Suite”, a piece composed by Ashley Seward in collaboration with Serena Formenti and Christina Draeger. Other groups explored how the mechanics of music can express minutiae of the scientific process. The piece “Fragmenta” uses overlapping musical structures that move from disjointed disorder to joyful melody, representing the inversion processes that allows geophysicists to pull useful patterns from seemingly chaotic data. Joseph Cabriotti, who worked with the piece’s composer Mariah Mennie, notes that he was surprised to find that inversion is also a specific musical technique; “finding the common ground between these two seemingly unrelated fields made it easier to communicate ideas between them.”

Translating geological or atmospheric processes into the equally complex language of music proved an exciting challenge. Annie Borch and Henry Crawford, working with composer Athena Loredo, grappled with how to express the scale of geologic processes in their collaborative piece, “Tuya”. “Taking tens of thousands of years of glacial and volcanic history and condensing it into a six-minute piece is challenging” Annie reflected, “we wanted to accurately express that timescale, but make sure the piece still retained a compelling musical form.” The collaboration proved to be a great lesson in translating effectively between scientific constraints and musical conventions.

Scientists and musicians first meet at a collaboration fair hosted by Axiom Brass in October

Working with the School of Music allowed some scientists consider their own research. Johan Gilchrist worked with composer Bahar Tahari on the piece “700°C The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes”, a piece that blends the sounds of the brass quintet with field recordings to describe the eerie build up and onset of the devastating 1912 Alaskan eruption of Novarupta volcano. “I’ve learned that recording the sounds of the natural phenomena I study is incredibly valuable and worthwhile” Johan remarked, “in fact, recording everything I observe with all my senses could prove useful for communicating my research in the future.”

Composers, musicians, and scientists came together to share the final musical pieces at the Chan Center on April 19th. After the successful night of performances, the minds behind the collaboration - EOAS’s Kirsten Hodge and the School of Music’s Valerie Whitney - are looking forward to reprising the project next year.

To read more media coverage on the collaboration, check out the following links:

Glacier Media via North Shore News, Castanet, Vancouver is Awesome, New Westminster Record, Alaska Highway News, Tricity News, Pique NewsMagazine, Richmond News, Delta Optimist, Sechelt / Gibsons Coast Reporter, Dawson Creek Mirror, Burnaby Now

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CBC On The Coast

EOAS' Professor Dominique Weis is one of UBC's six newest University Killam Professors speaking at the upcoming panel Research horizons: What now, what next? An evening with UBC's newest University Killam Professors. on Monday, May 2nd from 6:30 onward at the Robert H. Lee Alumni Center. Professor Weis is a renowned leader in the application of trace elements and radiogenic isotopes analysis. Her analytical insight has enabled new discoveries into Earth systems such as mantle plumes and hotspot volcanoes. Through the analysis of a wide range of materials such as honey, salmon, or belongings, her expertise allows the opening of new lines of research into health/epidemiology, local pollution/food security, and archeology/Indigenous-led studies. Professor Weis is a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in the Geochemistry of the Earth’s mantle, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, of the Geochemical Society and the American Geophysical Union.

Geochemistry helps us understand how the Earth formed and how it works. We can also use geochemistry directly to help in the discovery of mineral resources, in keeping the planet habitable and in assessing how clean our cities are. The potential applications of these tools over the last century have been highly dependent on the development of analytical techniques. These techniques helped us to determine an absolute age for the Earth as recently as 1956. Nowadays, Uranium-Lead dating means we can determine the age of objects and materials with astonishing precision, while using ever-smaller samples–as little as a nanogram. In this presentation, Professor Weis will share recent game-changing applications of geochemistry, looking at volcanoes, environmental biomonitoring, archaeology and anthropology.

The event is free, but has limited space. Reserve your spot by booking a ticket here.