IN THIS ISSUE:
NEWS
REPORTS
The position offers a unique opportunity for someone with burning enthusiasm to lead a renaissance of geoscience in Canada, by introducing initiatives directed to the goals of CGC, and by the energetic pursuit of activities suggested by the Council and its Board of Directors. The position will be located in Ottawa to lead CGC’s outreach to federal government and its agencies. The ideal candidate will have: a degree (preferably higher) in geoscience or a closely-related field; working experience in one or more of its sectors (industry, academia, government); excellent communications, organisational and inter-personal skills; a desire to raise the profile of geoscience in Canada; and strong self-motivation. This is a contractual position: remuneration and period of initial contract are negotiable. Work hours must be flexible, initially part time.
Please respond to Dr. Jeremy Hall, Dept. of Earth Sciences, MUN, St. John’s, NF, A1B 3X5.
Tel: (709) 737-7569. Fax: (709) 737-2589. E-mail: jhall@waves.esd.mun.ca
As all our Listserve members know, CGC recently organized a census of geoscientists in Canada. Census forms were distributed by most member societies with dues’ notices. We have received several thousand completed forms which are in the process of being analysed. A review of responses will take place at the next CGC Council to be held during the GAC-MAC Meeting in St. John’s at the end of May.
We are sure that there are still geoscientists out there who have not submitted a census form. We would really like to hear from them. So at the next coffee break, staff or project meeting, please ask your colleagues if they have completed the census. If they haven’t received a form, if it went quickly into the blue box and thanks to your prompting they’re having second thoughts, or if it’s somewhere around but they don’t know where, they can send an e-mail requesting another one to geoscience@geoscience.ca. It only takes a few minutes to fill in the form and if they give us their e-mail too, we’ll put them on the Listserve too.
This will be a regular feature of the bulletin. Please send details of other upcoming meetings for posting in future bulletins to alewkowi@uottawa.ca
Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum: Québec City April 29-May 2, 2001
Additional details: www.minespace2001.orgCanadian Geophysical Union: Ottawa May 14-17, 2001 (Joint Meeting with Eastern Snow Conference)
Additional details: www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~cguconf/main.htmlGeological Association of Canada/ Mineralogical Association of Canada: St. John’s May 27-30, 2001
Additional details: www.esd.mun.ca/stjohns2001Canadian Association of Geographers: Montreal May 30-June 3, 2001
Canadian Society for Coal Science and Organic Petrology: Calgary June 15-16, 2001
Canadian Quaternary Association: Whitehorse August 20-24, 2001
Canadian Geotechnical Society: Calgary September 16-19, 2001
Note: This information should be passed on to any contacts you have in the US among K-12 teachers, or to professionals/ university faculty who may have these contacts.
There has been a movement in the last few months to get the College Board, the people who run Advanced Placement (AP) courses to institute an AP geology course. This would have the virtue of raising the profile of geology in the US system. Interested teachers should fill out the survey at: www.collegeboard.org/ap/newsubjects/geology.html
Over the past 3 decades, the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) and its predecessor, the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), have conducted an extraordinarily successful program of research drilling in the world’s ocean basins to determine the geologic history of the ocean basins, the history of the Earth’s climate and global oceanic circulation, the evolution of marine life, the structure and composition of the oceanic crust and the nature and extent of energy and mineral resources in the seafloor. By every measure, the program has been a remarkable success: Since drilling began in 1968, 1200 sites have been drilled on 194 legs in all of the world’s oceans except the Arctic. Funding and participation in the program are truly international, with 21 countries (the US, UK, Germany, Japan, an 11-member consortium of European countries, a 4-member consortium of Pacific Rim, or PACRIM, countries which includes Canada, Australia, South Korea and Taiwan, plus France and China) contributing $50M annually to the program. Over 2000 scientists from 31 countries having participated on the ship during ODP alone. More importantly, the drilling program has been responsible for a seemingly endless string of scientific discoveries including proof of the theory of seafloor spreading, proof that the extinctions at the K/T boundary were caused by a meteorite impact, determination of the timing of Arctic and Antarctic glaciation, the cause of the Jurassic Quiet Zone, the discovery of immense clathrate deposits off the Carolinas, the role of Milankovitch cycles as forcing functions in climate change, drying up of the Mediterranean Sea, the origin of the Layer 2/3 boundary in the ocean crust, among many others. The results have had a profound impact on almost every discipline in the earth sciences, leading many scientists to consider the Ocean Drilling Program to be the most successful international research program ever conducted in the earth sciences.
The principal benefits that accrue to any member country in the program come from having scientists and graduate students participate on cruises and advisory panels, from drilling in territorial waters or in areas of national scientific or economic interest and from technology transfer and contracts. Since Canada joined the Ocean Drilling Program in 1985, it has benefited enormously, even though its annual contribution is relatively small ($983K US, or 2% of the ODP budget). More than 120 Canadian scientists from universities, government laboratories and industry have sailed on the drillship, 12 as Co-Chief Scientists; 5 cruises have drilled in Canadian waters and a large number of Canadian scientists have served on the program’s advisory panels. In addition, about $1.8M has been spent in Canada per year since 1992 on contracts and port calls. With other proposals by Canadian scientists already approved or under consideration for drilling during the next several years, including one in the South Pacific (Manus Basin) and two off eastern Canada (Newfoundland Basin, Laurentide Ice Sheet Outlets), it is anticipated that Canada will reap similar benefits to the end of the current program.
Drilling in the Future (IODP)
Despite its many successes, the Ocean Drilling Program has not been able to drill in many key environments because of technical limitations imposed by its drillship, The JOIDES RESOLUTION. Thus ODP has never been able to drill in shallow water (<50 m), in the oil – or gas-charged sediments found along continental margins, in the Arctic or to depths of more than about 2 km in thick sediments or oceanic basement anywhere, even though the petroleum industry routinely drills to far greater depths. To overcome these limitations, the present drilling program is scheduled to come to an end in 2003 and be replaced by a new program, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), which will use a variety of state-of-the-art drilling platforms, each tailored to drill in different environments, rather than a single, dedicated platform which can only drill efficiently in one. To this end, the Japanese are currently building a riser-equipped drillship to core in thick sediments along continental margins or in subduction zones where well control is needed for deep penetration and blowout prevention. The US is also planning to upgrade an existing drillship with better and deeper drilling capabilities and
Europeans are looking into the possibility of funding other mission-specific platforms to address special coring needs, for example drilling in the Arctic Ocean. The use of such alternate platforms will be the subject of a meeting (APLACON – alternate platform conference) organized by European scientists in Lisbon this summer (for details see www.jeodi.org).
Canada’s membership in the IODP
The IODP will be the most expensive program the earth science community has undertaken to date (budget ~ US$140M/yr with 1/3 contribution from US, 1/3 from Japan and 1/3 from the rest of the member countries). Individual membership in the program will be approximately US$5M/yr. Canada has played a significant role in the present program and has benefited enormously scientifically, technologically and financially. It stands to benefit even more from the new program (IODP) because many of the new program objectives identified in the recently internationally-prepared document called Earth, Ocean, and Life: Scientific Investigations of the Earth System Using Multiple Drilling Platforms and New Technologies (see www.iodp.org are central to Canadian interests and can, in several cases, be addressed by drilling along Canada’s long and varied ocean margins. These objectives include Arctic drilling, deep drilling in passive margins and in seismogenic zones, climate change, subduction complexes, the deep biosphere, seafloor observatories and probing the lower oceanic crust. While Canadian science will benefit from the solution of global problems wherever they are solved, drilling in areas of Canadian interest will have the added advantage of addressing problems of pressing Canadian economic or societal concern. For example, drilling in the Arctic to determine the history of the Arctic Ocean basin and its influence on global climate will also provide the Canadian petroleum industry with information on Arctic source and reservoir rocks needed for basin analysis and it will provide Canadian environmental scientists and social planners with information on the effects of clathrate release and climate change in the far North. Similarly, drilling and coring in the thick passive margin sequences along the east coast of Canada to study the early stages of continental rifting and the effects of sea level change on seismic stratigraphy will provide Canadian industry with the continuous stratigraphic sections needed to correlate between wells, and government scientists with the information needed to interpret decades of seismic data. Finally, drilling in the subduction system off Canada’s west coast to study the mechanics of subduction will provide our petroleum industry with information on clathrate reservoirs and the timing of earthquakes, tsunamis and submarine slides required for hazard assessment. The new program will provide opportunities for teachers and students from schools all over the world to participate in each new scientific discovery. More efforts will be made to communicate important discoveries more effectively to the general public. This means providing more educational material to schools and displays to science museums, video documentaries, and Websites.
It is therefore important for Canada to join this new program not only for the benefit it will bring to its earth sciences program but equally for its socio-economic benefits. Canada needs to be part of this international program to tackle many of the exciting problems in earth sciences which are of interest internationally but which no single nation can tackle alone. There seems to be strong support within Canada to join this program based on the results of meetings organized by the Canada ODP office and responses received from Universities. Efforts are now under way by a group of scientists from university, government and industry to prepare a strong and visionary proposal for submission to the Canada Foundation for Innovation, under its International Fund category, for a membership in IODP on behalf of a consortium of Universities right across Canada. Further information on Canadian activities in this program can be obtained by visiting the ODP Website www.dal.ca/CanadaODP.
Shiri Srivastava, Canada ODP Secretariat
The name of IGCP was recently changed from the International Geological Correlation Programme to the International Geoscience Programme; the acronym remains the same.
Until its annual meeting in late February (by teleconference), membership of CNC-IGCP consisted of N.W. Rutter (Chairman), C.F. Gower (Secretary-Treasurer), H.C. Halls, G. Nowlan, F. Robert, B. Schreiner, J. Teller, and P. Bobrowsky (International Director, CGC; ex officio). New members were nominated to CNC-IGCP to replace retiring N. Rutter and G. Nowlan and the vacancy of C. Gower who assumed Secretary Treasurer role. The Committee endorsed the nominations of Jim Teller, Marcus Zentilli and Guy Narbonne.
Several existing IGCP projects currently lack Canadian leaders. Scientists interested in leading the following projects should contact the Secretary Treasurer: Project #433 (Caribbean Plate Tectonics) and Project #436 (Pacific Gondwana Margin).
The following new projects approved by the Scientific Board for the period 2001-2005:
Suitable Canadian candidates were proposed to act as Canadian Leaders and are now being contacted by the Secretary Treasurer.
Funding for CNC-IGCP comes directly from the CGC and following recommendations by the CGC Council at their January 2001 meeting, financial support has been reduced from $20,000 to $11,000 for this coming fiscal year. Funding requests of $34,485 based on estimated travel expenses of $90,785 were received by CNC-IGCP. Given the financial reductions, funding allocations by CNC-IGCP were reduced to $1000, $800 and $500 for international (excluding Europe), European and North American travel, respectively.
For the upcoming fiscal year funding was approved for the following projects (Canadian funding recipients in parentheses)
Peter Bobrowsky, International Director, CGC
CGC is a member of PAGSE which is "a cooperative association of more than 20 national organizations in science and Engineering formed in June, 1995, at the invitation of the Academy of Science of the Royal Society of Canada to foster common interests and address issues concerning research and applications of science in Canada". Representatives of member organizations meet at bimonthly intervals. PAGSE represents an extensive resource that, through contracts, can hold events and undertake studies and assessments of benefit to government departments and agencies, to non-government organizations, and to the general public.
For the past five years PAGSE has organized an annual symposium as part of its activities to further this mandate. It also rganizes a series of breakfasts on Parliament Hill "Bacon & Eggheads" for Parliamentarians, Scientists and Engineers to "bridge the gap" between policy makers and experts in a variety of fields. This is a high profile activity, cosponsored by PAGSE and NSERC, which has been very successful and much appreciated by politicians who make a special effort to attend.
Each year PAGSE prepares a brief to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance. This year our brief "Investments in Research and Innovation – The Pursuit of Excellence" was submitted in September 2000.
PAGSE also commissions major studies. This year it was a broad and comprehensive survey of research priorities in universities, the private sector and government institutions titled "Setting Priorities for Research in Canada". PAGSE cooperates with Industry Canada to organize presentations for senior government officials and others on topics in science policy, industrial research and similar themes. In 1999-2000 presentations dealt with science policy in Japan, France, the USA and elsewhere.
In addition PAGSE meets once a year with the Secretary of State for Science, the Presidents of NRC, NSERC, SSHRC and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), with the President of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and with senior government officials to discuss research funding priorities.
The support which PAGSE receives from its member societies is essential if it is to be effective in promoting the importance of research and innovation to the quality of life for all Canadians.
Denis A. St-Onge, President PAGSE
For additional information on National Instrument 43-101, please go to www.chamberofmines.bc.ca/news/csa_ni43-101start.htm not the CGC Web-page.
New Brunswick has been registering geologists since December 1999, with the engineers – APEGNB.