Author: College of Engineering

The Ontario Geological Survey, Ministry of Northern Development and Mines and the A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum teamed up to co-host the 63rd Annual Institute on Lake Superior Geology held in Wawa, Ontario May 8-12.

This professional meeting consisted of two days of technical sessions with 29 oral and 22 poster presentations. There were three geological field trips before the technical sessions and three after.

The meeting was attended by 137 geologists from the US and Canada. Academic institutions (58 members), government agencies (28 members), and mining and consulting companies (36 members) were well represented among attendees.

Margaret Hanson, museum assistant director, served as registrar for the meeting while Ted Bornhorst, museum executive director and professor, organized the meeting sessions, handled finances and decided on travel awards to students.

The Institute publishes technical volumes in hard copy for each meeting and offers them open-access online after the meeting is completed.

Bornhorst and Hanson co-edited the Institute on Lake Superior Geology, Proceedings Volume 63, Part 1: Program and Abstracts (97p.). They also compiled Part 2: Field Trip Guidebook (204p.).

The Institute is well regarded for its high quality field trips having recently won a national award from the Geoscience Information Society for the Outstanding Geologic Field Trip Guidebook Series.

The Institute initiated a new annual award for 2017, Pioneer of Lake Superior Geology, to recognize those individuals who made significant contributions to the understanding of the geology of the Lake Superior region primarily prior to the Institute’s awarding of the prestigious annual Goldich Medal in 1979.

The first Pioneer of Lake Superior Geology is Douglass Houghton (1809-1845). Bornhorst nominated Houghton for the award and wrote, along with Larry Molloy, President of the Keweenaw County Historical Society, the two-page biographical sketch published in the Proceedings Volume. As the first speaker for the technical sessions, Bornhorst provided the highlights of the important attributes that contributed to Houghton’s success.

By Ted Bornhorst, A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum.

James DeGraff (GMES/GLRC) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $27,500 research and development contract from the US Geological Survey. The project is “The Keweenaw Fault Geometry, Secondary Structures and Slip Kenematics Along the Bete Grise Bay Shoreline.”

This is a one-year project.

Simon Carn (GMES) discusses sulfur dioxide emissions in an article accompanying a NASA Image of the Day showing the extent of the fires in Mosul, Iraq.

Sulfur Dioxide Spreads Over Iraq

In June 2003, atmospheric scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, used satellites to track how much sulfur dioxide streamed into the atmosphere from a fire at a sulfur mine and processing facility near Mosul, Iraq. They calculated that the fire at Al-Mishraq, which burned for nearly a month, released 21 kilotons of toxic sulfur dioxide per day. That is roughly four times as much as is emitted each day by the world’s largest single-source emitter of sulfur dioxide, a smelter in Noril’sk, Russia.

More recently, sulfur dioxide has been lofted to higher altitudes where it may undergo long-range transport. —Simon Carn

Read more at NASA Earth Observatory, by Joshua Stevens and Adam Voiland.

In the News

News outlets around the world covering the Mosul, Iraq fires quoted Simon Carn (GMES) for his work in sulfur dioxide emissions. The original story was posted by NASA’s Earth Observatory along with satellite images; news outlets include ABC News, Nature World News, Yahoo News and a number of science blogs.

By Allison Mills.

The Smithsonian Magazine referenced Simon Carn’s (GMES) volcanology research, which seeks to incorporate emissions data into the Smithsonian database, in a feature story along with an interactive map.

How Earthquakes and Volcanoes Reveal the Beating Heart of the Planet

Earthquakes and volcanoes can conjure up images of widespread destruction. But for those who study Earth’s deepest reaches, like Elizabeth Cottrell, a research geologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and director of the Global Volcanism Program, volcanoes are also “windows to the interior.”

“Global satellite monitoring of volcanoes will transform our understanding of gas fluxes from Earth’s interior to exterior in the coming decade,” says Cottrell, who has been working along with Michigan Tech researcher Simon Carn and data manager Ed Venzke to incorporate volcanic emissions into the Smithsonian database since 2012.

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine, by Rachel E. Gross.