News

Group members Christina Smeaton, Bingjie Shi, and Kunfu Pi recently attended the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference which was held August 12-17 in Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to attending talks, networking, and presenting their research, they were also able to catch up with ERG alumni Taylor Maavara (PDF at Berkeley Lab), Ekaterina Markelova (consultant at Amphos 21, Barcelona, Spain), and Gianna Marschmann (PhD student at University of Hohenheim and future PDF at Berkeley Lab). 

On June 17-20, the 1^stInternational Conference on Water Security took place in Toronto. The conference brought together water experts from around the world to discuss new platforms and tools to move scientific knowledge and data into solutions that mitigate the impacts of human activities on the availability and quality of freshwater resources.

Vice-President, Academic and Provost George Dixon announced the winners of the 2017 Outstanding Performance Awards, among them Philippe Van Cappellen.

A delegation of the Water Institute (WI) comprising Roy Brouwer, Neil Thomson and Philippe Van Cappellen visited São Paulo State on May 7-10, hosted by the Secretariat of the Environment of the São Paulo State government. The Secretariat integrates several agencies and institutes within the Environmental System of São Paulo (SAP), including the São Paulo State Environmental Agency (CETESB), the Forestry Foundation and the Geological Institute. The visit was facilitated by the Canadian Consulate in São Paulo, in particular thanks to the efforts of Mr. Patrick Courcelles.

A paper published this week in Nature Communications by researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute presents new findings on the distribution of microplastics in Arctic sea ice. The paper is featured in an article in the magazine Popular Science and includes comments by Dr. Philippe Van Cappellen.

The full article, titled "Good job: Arctic sea ice is full of our junk plastic", is available on Popular Science's website.

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers of the Ecohydrology Research Group and colleagues from the Université Libre de Bruxelles report that dam reservoirs trap nearly 20% of the organic carbon moving from land to ocean via the world’s rivers. The research is part of Taylor Maavara’s PhD research. Taylor is the lead author of the paper, co-authors are Philippe Van Cappellen, Ronny Lauerwald and Pierre Regnier.

Read the entire open-access article.

Philippe Van Cappellen joined a delegation of the Water Institute to China. The delegation held talks with researchers and officials from Wuhan University, China University of Geosciences, Southwest University, Chongqing University, China Research Academy of Environmental Sciences (CRAES) and Hohai University.