Geology Department Honours students publish their thesis research

Sadie Fischer

In the last couple of months, two Geology Honours students have published their Honours thesis research in international peer reviewed journals, a significant achievement that reflects the high quality of the Honours research projects our students undertake.

 

First off and perhaps most impressive is Sadie Fischer (HBSc Geology Class of 2015), whose paper "Biological mats in siliciclastic sediments of the Paleoproterozoic Gunflint Formation, Northwestern Ontario, Canada” authored with her supervisor Dr. Phil Fralick will be published in the August edition of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

 

The paper is the first description of mats of bacteria that lived on the shallow, sandy seafloor in the Thunder Bay area 1,878 million years ago. The rocks preserve the evidence of this ancient life as the “pond scum” growing on the bottom bound the sand grains together creating odd structures in the layers, even though the bacterial mats themselves have degraded into thin streaks of carbon.This paper has been selected by the Editor-in-Chief to be featured under the Editor’s Choice section of the Journal’s homepage, a notable honour. 

On the same theme, Ben Kuzmich’s research from his Honours thesis has just been published in the Journal Precambrian Research in a paper by Shiwei Wang, Ben Kuzmich, Pete Hollings, Taofa Zhou, Fangyue Wang entitled "Petrogenesis of the Dog Lake Granite Chain, Quetico Basin, Superior Province, Canada: Implications for Neoarchean crustal growth”.

 

Ben completed a study of the Dog Lake Chain granites north of Thunder Bay using petrography and geochemistry to develop a new model for their formation, working with Dr. Hollings. Dr. Shiwei Wang was at Lakehead for two years as the CESME Postdoctoral Fellow and conducted further work on Ben’s samples using a variety of state of the art analytical techniques.

 

Ben graduated in 2012 and went on to do a MSc thesis at Lakehead. He now works for Barrick at the Hemlo Au mine in Marathon, Ont.