News

Wat On Earth: March 2006 (PDF)

By: Michael C. Moncur

Graphite is an opaque, non-metallic carbon polymorph that is blackish silver in colour and metallic to dull in sheen. Since it resembles the metal lead, it also known colloquially as black lead or plumbago.

Two issues ago I started a brief review about the geologically hazardous position of Naples, Italy, snuggled between the volcanically active area of Campi Flegrei in the west and the Somma-Vesuvius volcanic complex to the east.

One of the surprising things of the "Ice Age" is that about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, a large embayment of the Atlantic Ocean extended up the St. Lawrence Valley into southern Quebec and eastern Ontario. The seashore extended across from the Lake Ontario basin near Kingston northeastward near Carleton Place to the Ottawa Valley as far as Pembroke. All of Ontario east of that shoreline, including Ottawa, and much of the St. Lawrence Valley of Quebec was flooded by sea water to depths as great as 100m (Fig. 1).

A University of Waterloo Earth Sciences undergraduate student received the Wood Bursary for the second year in a row. This year's winner of the prestigious $6000 award from the Women's Association of the Mining Industry of Canada Foundation is Amy Nicoll (see photo above), who accepted the award at a ceremony in Toronto in October. Michelle Sabourin was the Waterloo recipient in 2004.

Margaret Ingleton and Peter Russell

Deep under a mountain range I was a part of a great mass of granite. I started my second rock cycle as molten magma, which gradually cooled over millions of years. When the mountains of which I was part of were eroded by wind and rain, my tiny particles became mud and sand. My quartz crystals were ground down and formed sand. This sand was just like the sand you play with on the beach in the summer.

Jacqueline Kreller, winner of the 2005 David M. Forget Essay

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck the area off the western coast of northern Sumatra on Sunday morning, 26 December 2004, at 7:59 am local time (00:59 GMT) triggered massive tsunamis that inundated coastal areas in countries all around the Indian Ocean rim, including India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The region is historically prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the margins of tectonic plates. However, tsunami waves of this magnitude are rare and the level of preparedness was very low.

Peter Russell

The oxidized zone of ore deposits has fascinated me for many years because of the process of their formation and the resulting reddish brown rocks. The colourful rocks are a signal to prospectors that economic ore cannot be far away. Stories abound of rusty outcrops luring prospectors across the southwestern U.S.A. to grub in the rocks to find a fortune, or a flicker of hope, which faded rapidly. Many generated a flurry of penny stocks, which changed from promise to worthless paper.