News

Join UBC Oceanography graduate students Yayla Sezginer and Katrina Schuler for a second of every day during their recent research cruise in the Arctic.

Dr. Shandin Pete was raised in Nłq̓alqʷ (“Place of the thick trees”, Arlee, Montana). His mother is from the Bitterroot Band of Salish in Montana and his father is Diné from Beshbihtoh Valley in Arizona. He is a hydrogeologist and science educator with interest in Indigenous research methodologies, geoscientific ethnography, Indigenous astronomy, social-political tribal structures, culturally congruent instructional strategies, and indigenous science philosophies. Most of his work in recent years has focused on community engagement to understanding shifts in an Indigenous paradigm of research for science knowledge production. This work has included extensive collaboration with tribal knowledge holders across Native communities and Indigenous academic scholars at institutions nationally and internationally.

Maite is an oceanographer who specializes in marine phytoplankton and the role that natural & human-produced trace metals play in their population levels. Phytoplankton may be microscopic, but on an annual basis, they convert around 45 gigatons of carbon dioxide to organic carbon, which is roughly half the total carbon fixation on the planet! She also studies how much of that converted carbon then sinks into the deep ocean (and how that sinking process happens). However, not all parts of the Earth’s oceans are equally vibrant with microbial life. Maite has studied which areas are more productive, and why, putting her on the front lines of our understanding of climate change.

Throughout his 47-year career, Ross Beaty has been a leader in the international mining and renewable energy industries, making a significant and lasting impact in BC and around the world. Driven by his passion for people, communities, and nature, he has brought together the worlds of mining and environmentalism to demonstrate that mining and environmental protection are not incompatible.

After graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1979 in geology and law, Ross began a geological contracting company, Beaty Geological, which he operated from 1980 through 1987. In 1985, Ross established Equinox Resources, a public exploration and gold mining company. In 1994, Ross sold Equinox and founded Pan American Silver. Based in Vancouver, Pan American is now one of the world’s largest silver mining companies with 10 operating mines in the Americas and over 12,000 employees. Between 1994 and 2017 Ross founded 11 other mineral exploration companies and a renewal energy company that has become one of Canada’s largest independent power producers. In 2018, Ross began Equinox Gold, which now operates eight mines in the Americas with over 6,000 employees.

Through all his endeavours, Ross has been committed to sustainable development and high standards of environmental, social and governance practices. Ross’s professional accomplishments are matched by his philanthropic efforts. In 2007 he established the Sitka Foundation with a mission to protect the environment and promote biodiversity. The Foundation partners with more than 70 Canadian and global environmental organizations focused on land conservation, education, scientific research and public policy in support of protection of the environment.

Geena Littel, Michael Bostock

In the summer of 2021, EOAS Ph.D. student Geena Littel and her supervisor Michael Bostock participated in a research cruise offshore, during which they deployed ocean-bottom seismometers (OBS) offshore the Alaskan panhandle. The work was part of a US-Canada collaborative project to study the Queen Charlotte Fault, which runs offshore Haida Gwaii and extends up to Alaska. The fault system represents the largest seismic hazard to southeastern Alaska and Canada outside of Cascadia, and in-depth characterization of it will provide a better understanding of the system and insights into hazard assessment and earthquake forecasting.

Over the course of the 10-day research cruise, the science team and technical OBS team deployed 28 ocean-bottom seismometers offshore Prince of Wales Island, Alaska (see map). They worked around the clock to make sure the instruments were deployed in a timely manner. The OBS will stay out for a year recording earthquakes until next year when the researchers will go back to retrieve them.

The research team set sail from Ketchikan, Alaska and returned to port in Seattle, WA on board the Marcus G. Langseth ship. Before they boarded the ship, it was out with a team of scientists and crew who collected multi-channel seismic data along the fault. Multi-channel seismic data acquisition involves using air guns that are towed behind the ship and generate large sound bubbles as the ship moves. These waves propagate through the water and upper crust and are then recorded by sensors towed along by the ship. This allows scientists to generate images of the structure of the upper crust of the oceanic seafloor.

The goal of the project is to study variations in structure along the Queen Charlotte Fault and the relationship with variations in earthquake behavior along the fault. The project was known as TOQUES: Transform Obliquity of the Queen Charlotte Fault and Earthquake Study. This is because the Queen Charlotte Fault becomes progressively more oblique at an angle to the orientation of the prevailing plate motions as one moves from the north along Alaska to Haida Gwaii, where it is the most oblique. This obliquity has caused a large magnitude 7.8 thrust earthquake in 2012 offshore Haida Gwaii. You can visit this website to learn more about the project: https://qcfhazards.net

Science team and technical team in front of the Marcus G. Langseth. Pictured: Andrew Barclay, Pete Liljegren, Hannah Brewer, Chris Carchedi, Geena Littel (UBC EOAS), Katie Bosman, Charlie Kleindins, Josh Kassinger, Todd Jensvol, Michael Bostock (UBC EOAS), and Mladen Nedimovic (Dalhousie University). A team of ocean bottom sensor technicians are also on board. Credit: Dustin Safranek

Dr. Georgia Peterson, Dr. Mark Jellinek, and Dr. Catherine Johnson

Understanding a planet’s thermal history—how it cools over time—helps scientists determine how its surface, interior and atmosphere evolved. Mercury is among the most enigmatic of the inner solar system planets in terms of its evolution. The Mariner 10 and MESSENGER missions have revealed that the planet has undergone substantial contraction, that it has today and had in the past a global magnetic field, and that it had extensive volcanic activity early in its history. At about one third the radius of Earth, how such a small planet came to be characterized by processes most scientists ascribe to larger planets like Earth has been a mystery.

            Mercury is notoriously difficult to observe from Earth, and hard for spacecraft to reach, due to its fast orbital speed and proximity to the Sun. Despite this, some major milestones in the planet’s history are known – revealed by data collected by the only two spacecraft to have visited the planet. The reverse faults that dominate Mercury’s surface are evidence for the first milestone, known since the Mariner 10 mission in the 1970s. These faults indicate that Mercury began to radially contract around 3.9 billion years ago, shrinking due to interior secular cooling, leaving the entire planet marred by giant, step-like scarps. The MESSENGER mission from 2008 to 2015 confirmed these observations and added two new major discoveries to them. Images of the surface from cameras onboard the MESSENGER spacecraft revealed evidence for a second milestone: planet-wide volcanic activity, voluminous enough to have formed a 15-60 km-thick crust that was later deformed as the planet contracted. The magnetic field recorded in this crust is evidence for the third of these milestones: it indicates that Mercury’s core produced an electromagnetic dynamo (i.e., a global magnetic field) from roughly 4 to 3.5 billion years ago. For all three of these events—volcanism, global contraction and an active dynamo—to have occurred, Mercury had to have cooled immensely in the earliest stages of its life as a planet. Until now, no thermal evolution model incorporates this early strong cooling.

            In a new approach, PhD Candidate Georgia Peterson and Dr’s Mark Jellinek and Catherine Johnson have created a new set of thermal models for Mercury. Peterson posits that the early ‘volcanic resurfacing’ acted as a major pathway for heat to travel from the interior of the planet to the crust and then out into space, providing the large early cooling event missing in other models. Incorporating this cooling event into their model accounts for the major milestones in the planet’s history: Mercury’s early cooling both sustained its core dynamo by driving convection in the planet’s molten interior, and accounts for the planet’s crustal contraction. The outputs of their model not only predict the total amount of radial contraction, but match the geological evidence that this contraction occurred more rapidly early in Mercury’s history than it does today.

            Along with Mercury’s extensive volcanic past, Peterson’s model also takes into account finer details, such as how mantle concentrations of H2O and heat-producing radioactive elements change during volcanic resurfacing, a new approach to calculate the amount of global contraction, and a more rigorous method of determining dynamo generation in a planetary core. Incorporating these new aspects into her modeling approach has had impressive results; 36% of her models can account for Mercury’s early contraction and dynamo milestones, compared to only 2% when the approach in previous studies is used. Their work, recently published in the October issue of Science Advances, opens the door to future studies on Mercury’s modern-day core dynamo and could help reconcile tectonics and dynamo generation on planets like Mars, Venus and Earth that also underwent early global volcanic resurfacing.