News

What is the St- Robert meteorite?

On the evening of June 14,1994, around 8:00 p.m. EDT, thousands of people in Ontario, Québec and the northern United States witnessed a spectacular fireball accompanied by a very loud sonic boom. Some 10 to 20 kilometres above the Earth's surface, the meteor exploded, showering fragments over southern Québec. Minutes later, one of these was recovered by Stephane Forcier on his family's farm in St-Robert de Sorel, east of Montréal. The following day, this piece was confirmed by the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) to be a meteorite.

Ten architects are under consideration to design UWs next major building, a home for research and teaching with an environmental and water theme.

The building also has a new name, the UW board of governors was told last week. It will be the Centre for Environmental Science and Engineering, said UW president Dr. James Downey.

He hinted that another word - a personal name - might go in front of the word Centre by the time the building opens, on the same principle as the William G. Davis Centre for Computer Research.

"No need to worry" was the consensus of the United Nations Climate Conference which closed in Berlin in early April. However, we do have cause for concern about carbon dioxide buildup and global warming and on Earth Day 1995 it is appropriate to explain why.

Minerals and how they are used

This information was compiled to accompany an exhibit sponsored by The Smithsonian Institution, General Motors and the Michigan Mineralogical Society. The exhibit includes a Chevrolet Lumina Minivan cut away and painted to show the places where the various minerals are used, and mineral specimens. The exhibit was featured at the gemshow last held last May in Waterloo. The exhibit will be on display soon at the Cranbrook Institute, in the Bloomfield Hills section of Detroit.

Remote sensing tools such as radar and sonar allow us to map topography and surficial characteristics of volcanoes and other geologic features in inaccessible (or cloud-covered) locations, including other planets and the seafloor. The following is a brief introduction and comparison of these two systems for those who have familiarity with one but not the other, or who sometimes use radar/sonar data but are a little hazy about where it comes from and what it really means.

These days, one hears a lot of talk about the 'Information Super Highway'. Often, one wonders what this actually means to us as individuals or as professional scientists. As soon as you discover the delights of Internet and the National Center for Supercomputing Application's program called 'Mosaic', you’ll see that the super highway has a lot to offer. Mosaic is an information browser that runs on the 'World Wide Web'. This enables documents to be linked together with information or images somewhere else on the Internet.

Students in most Earth Sciences programs at the University of Waterloo are required to attend a major field trip around the time they commence their final undergraduate year. This year, one group of students chose a trip to the southwest corner of the United States with the goal of exploring the geological development of that fascinating region. Most of the route we traversed with them lies within the tectonic region known as the Basin and Range Province.