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Early-career researcher at #EGU26 Thursday:
**Julia Baumgarte**, Lekima Yakuden, and James Kirkpatrick
Contact Stress Distribution and Slip Stability on Experimental FaultsEGU26-313 | Orals | EMRP1.6
07 May, 08:55–09:05 (CEST) Room -2.31 -
Early-career researcher at #EGU26 Wednesday:
PC5 – Rumbles from the deep: On Alaskan megatsunamis, active submarine volcanoes, and the seismoacoustic signals of blue whales.
06 May 2026, 14:00 CEST
**Eva Goblot **, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Christian Hübscher , University of Hamburg
Benedikt Haimerl , University of Hamburg
Stephen Hicks , University College London
#DalhousieUniversity #BlueWhales #Seismology #EarthSystemScience
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The #RaspberryShake recordings of today's western Quebec earthquake from a noisy site in Montreal (R9499) and a quiet site near the Quebec-Maine-New Brunswick borders.
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A very colourful and entertaining talk this week from Dr. Inna Lykova
(Research Scientist and Acting Curator, Canadian Museum of Nature). She showed us the amazing minerals found at the fissure eruption of Tolbachik volcano, #Kamchatka (Mindat.org lists 371 valid minerals, with 153 type localities). These minerals seem to form in a complex chromatographic fumerole system.Photo of zincobradaczekite, a sodium-copper-zinc arsenate
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#Earlycareer talk at #AGU25 Wednesday:
Erica Lucas
Widespread Seismic Tremor in Greenland’s Fjords
S32B-08 17Dec, 356 CC 11:40-11:50
(with Yajing Liu & @natalyagomez)Water (and heat) transport through Greenland's glacial fjords to tidewater glaciers is sparsely measured. They find seismic tremor from coastal, land-based seismometers corresponds to modelled periods of turbulent water flow and standing eddies in these fjords.
#Cryosphere #Greenland #Seismology #McGillUniversity #UCSantaCruz
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An early career presenter at #AGU25 Monday:
Luhong (Amy) Lu
The influence of the 2011 Mw 9.1 Tohoku earthquake on the Boso slow slip sequence
T14A-05, 353 (NOLA CC) 15Dec, 17:00 - 17:10
(Yajing Liu’s group, #McGillUniversity)The Boso Peninsula is south of the Tohoku earthquake and has two ocean plates subducting under it.
They numerically model stress transfer to the Boso area using constrained non-planar fault geometry models for the Philippine Sea plate. -
An early-career presenter at AGU Monday:
Julia Baumgarte
Frictional Behavior and Shear Localization in Experiments with Realistic Fault Roughness Bounding Gouge LayerT12A-07, 354-355 (NOLA CC) Monday: 11:35 - 11:45
(Jamie Kirkpatrick’s group, McGill and Univ. Nevada, Reno)
They will present the results of experimental deformation of replicas of realistic fault surfaces.
#AGU25 #Seismology #EarlyCareer #McGillUniversity #UNReno #Earthquake
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@FaithfullJohn Here's a hand sample photo of a komatiite flow from nearby in the Abitibi of Quebec, also ~ 2.7 Ga.
#Abitibi #Quebec #Komatiite #Archean #Geology -
Mary Kang (Civil Engineering, McGill) gave us an entertaining and possibly hopeful talk (despite the topic) focused on quantifying fugitive methane emissions. One disturbing figure: their survey of inactive (non-producing wells) suggests continuing methane emissions seven times that of Canada's National Inventory Report. Hopeful in that much of these emissions are from a fraction of the total wells and therefor easier to stop.
#MethaneEmissions #GHG #Canada #fossilfuels #McGillUniversity
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Over two billion tonnes of iron ore have been mined from the Labrador Trough of Quebec and Labrador over the last 70 years. The paleo-Proterozoic sediments have been variably metamorphosed (you can see the bend in the southern part of the belt caused by the younger Grenville orogeny). Much of the direct shipping ore is dominated by the mineral #Hematite.
The steel of your lunchtime knife and fork may have come from the Trough!
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Massive #hematite later brecciated by quartz veining, From the Soudan ironstone, Ely greenstone belt, Vermilion district of northern Minnesota.
These ironstones are sandwiched between pillow basalts of approximately 2.7 billion years old.
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The organizers of #MinCup25 are very clever. Today and yesterday feature three aluminosilicates that are compositionally co-linear!
Diagram from Barton (1982), published in the American Mineralogist.
#kyanite #topaz #zunyite #aluminosilicate #MineralSocAmerica #ArgillicAlteration
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Today, molybdenum is one of the most common trace elements in the ocean due to oxidative weathering of #Molybdenite. But in the Archean the oceans were reducing, and molybdenum was scarce.
Other nitrogenases evolved to use other transition elements, but Mo-nitrogenase was first, and best.
Molybdenite enables the Earth's biosphere!
#MinCup25 #NitrogenFixation #Nitrogenase #Archean #GreatOxidationEvent #OreCup #OreCup25
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#Molybdenite is the primary host for the element molybdenum in the Earth's crust.
Molybdenum is part of the most effective biological molecule for nitrogen fixation (Mo-nitrogenase), which converts atmospheric N2 to a bio-available form.
The grey sphere is Mo; this complex molecule likely evolved more than 3.2 billion years ago.
#MInCup25 #NitrogenFixation #Nitrogenase #Archean #OreCup #Orecup25 -
@dt The clever map above has the Route Verte drawn as a Metro network.
The Route Verte is a network of bike and multipurpose (non-motorized) trails separated from roads across SW Quebec. Many segments are built on repurosed rail beds.
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Considering attending one of the two national #geoscience meeings: the #GSA or the #AGU ? Graphed is the registration cost (member early-bird) for these meetings, compared to the US inflation rate. These meetings are now too costly to attend for many, especially since grants haven't matched the inflation rate.
This year due to location (GSA: Texas, AGU: Louisiana) there is the added cost of emergency evacuation insurance for those who can't get health care in these states.
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A well illustrated talk by Dr. Ali Polat (University of Windsor, Ontario), the 2024 Geological Associate of Canada Robinson lecturer. He gave persuasive evidence for compressive tectonics throughout the Archean.
Figure is of refolded isoclinal folds in the Archean (2.8 Ga) Storø Greenstone belt, southern West Greenland.
#McGillUniversity #GAC #UWindsor #Ontario #Canada #Greenland #Archean #Geology #Tectonics
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Any eye-opening talk today by Dr. Peter DeCarlo, Johns Hopkins University. His group is measuring organic air pollutants in residential areas near industry.
Context for the map below: 11 parts per trillion is the EPA level for a 1:10,000 cancer risk from long-term exposure.
From:
Robinson et al. (2024) Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (25), 11084-11095. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.3c10579#JHU #JohnsHopkins #McGillUniversity #AirQuality #Petrochemical
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Rocks breaking in tension, compression, and shear; an interesting teaching talk yesterday by Dr. Drew Lubiniecki. Below is a fascinating figure showing the loss of porosity in deformation bands (DB) in a sheared carbonate. The original porosity is shown in blue.
From Lubiniecki et al. (2019) J. Structural Geology 126:11–24
#McGillUniversity #StructuralGeology #UniversityAdelaide #Carbonate
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Congratulations to Dr. Pascale Daoust, who successfully defended, "Ocean Acidification: Insights from the Behaviour of Ancient and Modern Carbonates", supervised by Al Mucci and Galen Halverson.
The work involved field and laboratory studies of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum section near Campo, Spain.
The figure shows the depositional environments at the time; from Daoust et al, submitted, modified from Pujalte et al. (2014)
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Plain light thin section (~ 4 cm wide)
Pale pink garnets (inclusion-rich cores and inclusion-free rims) surrounded by mostly biotite.From the Nuvvuagittuq formation near #Inukjuak Canada.
Coupled Sm-Nd isotopes suggest that the original rock (the protolith) may be as old as 4.3 billion years. This sample has been pervasively metamorphosed at least four times since then.
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Collin Ward (#WHOI) spoke to us today about the lessons learned from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: particularly the speed and extent of photochemical oxidation of crude oil. This is what turns the oil into sticky emulsified globs on the beaches.
#McGillUniversity #OilSpill #Remediation #EarthSystemScience -
A very cool talk this week at GEOTOP by André Pellerin, University of Quebc at Rimouski. He spoke on the strange chemistry and biology of Lake Untersee, east Antarctica. This lake is perpetually ice-covered and the bottom covered with #stromatolites (microbial mats) similar to those found in ecosystems three billion years in Earth's past.
#UCAR #Antarctica #Rimouski #Quebec #Archean #GEOTOP -
Monday's early-career presenters at #AGU23 in San Francisco, California.
*Aube Gourdeau*
T11D-0188 An Ongoing Search for Active Faults in the Western Quebec Seismic Zone, Eastern Canada
Mid-day posters, Monday*Jillian Kendrick*
V13C-0134 Chloritoid as an Indicator of Metasomatic Processes in Archean Greenstone Belts
Evening posters, Monday#McGillUniversity #GeoScience #Seismology #Archean #Geology #EarthSystemScience
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We learned about forming the Archean continental crust today from Dr. Jill Kendrick. Using modelling, field investigations, and geochemistry she was able to constrain the hydrous melting of mafic crust to form granitoids (TTGs to be specific). Field shot from the Kapuskasing Structural Zone in Ontario.
#Archean #Geology #Tectonics #McGillUniversity #ContinentalCrust -
#Calcite can form when cool groundwater warms as it rises to the surface. Calcium carbonate exhibits inverse solubility -it's less soluble in warmer water. As a result #tufa deposits can form -like those at Mono Lake. A nice write up of groundwater carbonate deposits at:
https://www.ontariobeneathourfeet.com/flowstone-travertine-and-tufa
#MinCup23 #Ontario #Carbonate #MineralSprings -
Excellent talk last week by Hannah Mark, now at Woods Hole on documenting thin lithosphere and low viscosities essential to model ice distribution over time in the southern Andes. Figure shows seismic velocities, with red corresponding to slow (hot) mantle. More info: https://essopenarchive.org/doi/full/10.1002/essoar.10510075.1
#McGillUniversity #WHOI #EarthSystemScience #Seismology #Lithosphere
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#Earthquakes and #WhaleCalls Yajing Liu presenting St-Lawrence paleorift results at the Canadian Geophysical Union Annual Meeting last week. Note umbrella as pointer. Photo by K. Thornton.
#CGU2023 #CGU #McGillUniversity