News

On May 5th, 2018, a rocket equipped with a seismometer to detect ground motion and information on electrical conductivity of subsurface rocks on Mars will be launched. Prof. Catherine Johnson has been working closely with NASA to help prepare for this launch and will be working with UBC Graduate Student Anna Mittelhoz to analyze the data post-mission.

Find out more here:

http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/ubc-professor-gets-ready-for-la…

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/mars-insight-mission-1.4645094

Prof. Greg Dipple's work on carbon sequestration, specifically his discoveries into natural carbonate formation in Oman, has been feature in the New York Times. Check it out by following the link below: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/26/climate/oman-rocks.html?…

Congratulations to EOAS PhD Candidate Emily Scribner for being awarded the Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant award.

The Killam Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards recognize the valuable role that Teaching Assistants play in undergraduate programs at UBC. They are presented each year to graduate students who have made outstanding contributions to teaching and learning at UBC. Only five graduate students from the Faculty of Science are awarded the prize each year.

The Multidisciplinary Applied Geochemistry Network (MAGNET) is an NSERC-funded industrial stream Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) initiative devoted to geochemistry. Directed by EOAS Professor, Dominique Weis, the program has connected trainees with leading scientists and state-of-the-art analytical laboratories across Canada, addressing challenges in analytical, environmental, and exploration geochemistry.

Since its creation in 2012, MAGNET has organized annual, week-long workshops aimed at equipping trainees with technical and professional skills and facilitating interactive learning and collaboration within the network. For its final year, MAGNET set out to end on a “HI” note, holding its grand finale workshop on the Big Island of Hawaii, under the leadership of Professor James Scoates with help from postdoctoral fellows Laura Bilenker, Elizabeth King, and Miling Li, and Program Coordinator Kimberly Low.

Activities included visits to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Mauna Kea, Pu’u wa’awa’a Cinder Cone State Park, Pololu Valley, Honokohau Harbor, and the active lava flows at Kalapana. Trainees investigated a variety of topics, including aquatic geochemistry, volcanic gases and soils, geothermal energy, Hawaii as a Mars analogue site, and geochemistry of lavas to trace travel, migration, and trade among ancient Polynesians.

For the full workshop report and photos, please see the MAGNET website: http://www.magnet.eos.ubc.ca/hawaiiws/

EOAS Post-doc fellow Nester Korolev and others have discovered a deep mineral, the fourth most abundant in the Earth, inside a diamond. The mineral can only exist deeper than at ~ 600 km and has never been seen on the surface before.

Check out the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25972

For more information, see this Science Alert article: https://www.sciencealert.com/super-deep-diamond-contains-calcium-silica…

Dr. Curtis Suttle of EOAS and colleagues have been studying how identical viruses can be found all around the globe. In their recent publication Deposition rates of viruses and bacteria above the atmospheric boundary layer in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, they describe how dust storms and ocean spray can help push microbes into the troposphere where they can be carried extreme distances.

For more information, check out the news story below:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/dust-storms-virus-ocean-…