Confessions of a Geoscience Educator – How Did I Get Here?

It is common to hear stories of highly gifted individuals pursuing a career path and ultimately landing their dream job after years of climbing the ladder. Sometimes I even tell people that I am very lucky to have landed my dream job. “Lucky” is certainly true, but the fact is, I’m not particularly gifted, nor did I imagine working in the career I have now, that is, being an educator. That sort of happened by accident. My job is amazing, but my work does not quite match what I originally envisioned. Yes, I have always wanted to be a paleontologist, and yes, people call me a paleontologist, but my main passion is teaching geology (and not much of it is actually paleontology). When people asked me what I did for a living, I used to reply that I was a paleontologist. Now, I’m more inclined to say that I’m a university teacher. I guess I am getting to that age where I wake up and think, “Well, how did I get here?”” (and now I’m cursing David Byrne because I know I’ll have that certain song in my head for the rest of the day). I am slightly bothered by the fact that I was born in 1966. This means I’m about as old as the theory of plate tectonics. I have only recently come to fully embrace this without the eye twitch! Plot it on the geologic time scale and it doesn’t look quite so bad. But I digress… I was born in the town of Olds, Alberta. My earliest memory of a rock that interested me was a piece of shale that a friend of the family showed me. It had a trilobite in it. Apparently, I had already shown an interest in rocks at this point, and she thought I might be interested in looking at it. I remember seeing it and thinking that it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. It looked kind of creepy, but beautiful at the same time. And a dead animal in a rock? Sign me up! I’ve noticed that a disproportionate number of photos I have of me as a kid show me looking at the ground for fossils (or rocks). I don’t know exactly what drew me to fossils and rocks. Maybe it has something to do with always having been vertically challenged (and being so close to the ground)? Or maybe it’s an obsession with dead things? I still don’t know exactly what it was… This obsession with fossils got me in trouble at times. I remember my mom being very upset with me for being nearly hit by a train while looking at the stones in the ballast of the train tracks. I was nearly hit by a car once when I was inspecting gravel on the side of the road too. I was developing an interest in dinosaurs as my parents would take me to Drumheller (about an hour and a half drive from Olds) to look for dinosaur fossils (the Royal Tyrrell Museum wasn’t yet constructed). Then my dad (a professor in horticulture) got a job at the University of Guelph. In Ontario. Well, dang – there goes dinosaur hunting.  Fortunately, I found out that there were a lot of old invertebrate fossils to be found in Ontario. I started finding fossils in…driveway gravel (of course). I was very, very fortunate to have parents who were supportive of my strange interests.   My fossil obsession continued through my teen years. I kept it hidden from most others, as I thought most people would think it was a really weird thing (but who are we kidding? Teens think everything is weird). One thing I did discover during high school is I always learned more about something if I had to explain it to someone else. This still holds true for me today. There are a whole lot of things I wouldn’t know now if I didn’t have to teach about them in my courses. The fantasy of becoming a paleontologist sat in the back of my mind for years. But I had always assumed that I would have to be an exceptional student to get into that sort of field. The thing was, I was not an exceptional student. Especially in science. And I was hopeless at math (and I’m still hopeless at math). My teachers in high school (and my guidance counsellor) told me that if I was to go to university after high school, my best bet would be visual art, music or maybe English. I don’t think any of them expected me to go into science. My grades, although definitely not stellar, were good enough to get me into the University of Western Ontario for science, and ultimately into the geology program. By the second year of my undergraduate program, I found my people. I became friends with other students interested in geology and was delighted to learn that a lot of my peers really sucked at math too. One of the most transformative realizations I came to appreciate from the courses I took was that paleontology was part of something much bigger than I formerly realized. Taking courses in a variety of subdisciplines – sedimentology, geochemistry, structural geology, petrology, and many others – made me appreciate the complexity and interconnectedness of natural processes in the Earth system as a whole. The idea that (in conjunction with characteristics of the rocks that contained them) fossils could be used to interpret past environments just blew my mind. And gaining the ability to visualize, in my minds eye, how a given rock formed (something I often to refer to as “looking beyond the rock”) felt like acquiring a superpower. So, while I came to my undergraduate degree wanting to study fossils, I left with a deeper appreciation of rocks – the context for fossils. So, l kept looking down, but my view of the ground became much, much bigger. From my undergraduate degree

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Rotating GIF of the Earth with the supercontinent Pangaea. Text over the Earth reads "Geoscience Today. How the Earth's last supercontinent broke apart to form the world we have today."

How the Earth’s last supercontinent broke apart to form the world we have today

Author: Alexander Lewis Peace, Assistant Professor (Structural Geology), McMaster UniversityThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Pangaea was the Earth’s latest supercontinent — a vast amalgamation of all the major landmasses. Before Pangaea began to disintegrate, what we know today as Nova Scotia was attached to what seems like an unlikely neighbour: Morocco. Newfoundland was attached to Ireland and Portugal. About 250 million years ago, Pangaea was still stitched together, yet to be ripped apart by the geological forces that shaped the continents as we know them today. For many years, geologists have pondered how all the pieces originally fit together, why they came apart the way they did and how they ended up spread across the globe. As an assistant professor in structural geology, I research plate tectonics — specifically how and why continents break up — and the related igneous rocks, natural resources and hazards. Puzzle Pieces We know that Nova Scotia and Morocco were once attached because their coastal areas — or margins — match up perfectly. We can also trace their path from the structure of the ocean floor now separating them. Today, we are much closer to understanding the shifting of the continents, including the movement of land masses, but there is still much to learn. The science of exactly why they ended up 5,000 km away from each other — and how other parts of the continental jigsaw puzzle pulled apart the way they did — has been extensively researched and debated. One camp believes the continents were dragged apart by the movement of tectonic plates driven by forces elsewhere. The other group believes that hot material from deeper underground forced its way up and pushed the continents apart. Whether one theory or the other or some combination of both is correct, this much is certain: whatever happened, didn’t happen quickly! Plate tectonics is an ongoing story that unfolds by mere millimetres each year. The change has added up over eons, placing us where we are today — still drifting, though almost imperceptibly. The North Atlantic An area of especially intensive study and lingering mystery is the North Atlantic — the area bounded by Greenland, Eastern Canada and Western Europe — where the final stages of Pangaea’s breakup played out. Curiously, perhaps, it is the region that spawned much of the geoscience that would successfully be applied to understanding the continental makeup of other regions of the world. When the North Atlantic began opening up, the continent started separating along the west side of Greenland. It then stopped and instead continued opening between eastern Greenland and Europe. Why? To solve this and related questions, two colleagues and I brought together about 30 researchers from many different fields of geoscience in the North Atlantic Working Group. Our research team includes geophysicists (who apply physics to understand processes in the Earth), geochemists (who apply chemistry to understand the composition of the materials that make up the Earth) and many others who study the structure and evolution of the Earth. To date, the North Atlantic Working Group has held a number of workshops and published a set of papers that propose a new model for answering some of the long-unanswered questions about what happened in the North Atlantic. Structural Inheritance Our North Atlantic Working Group was able to draw many types of data together and to tackle the problem from multiple angles. We concluded that most important geological events were strongly influenced by earlier activity — a process called “inheritance.” Throughout the history of the Earth, the continental landmasses have several times come together and then subsequently been torn apart. This process of amalgamation and subsequent dispersal is known as a “supercontinent cycle.” These previous events left behind scars and lines of weakness. When Pangaea was stressed again, it tore open along these older structures. While this process was suggested in the early days of plate tectonic theory, it is only now becoming clear just how important and far reaching it is. At the largest scale, the tear that formed the North Atlantic started first to the west of Greenland. There, it hit ancient mountain belts that would not break apart. There was less resistance to the east of Greenland, which opened like a zipper and eventually took up all the widening to form the North Atlantic Ocean. In addition, relics from these previous plate tectonic cycles left remnants deep in the Earth’s mantle that were susceptible to melting, explaining much of the widespread molten rocks that accompanied breakup. And at the smaller scale, it appears that the hydrocarbon bearing basins left behind on the continental margins were also influenced by previous events. Much of what we know about this was gathered in the search for oil and gas. Our most detailed knowledge comes from coastal areas closest to the markets where those commodities are processed and sold, and most of it has been obtained since the 1960s, using post-war technology to scan the bottom of the oceans. These economic factors mean that our knowledge of the subsurface drastically diminishes beyond Newfoundland. North of that, there is much to explore and to understand, where the answers to the remaining mystery of how we got here lie miles beneath the waves. I am a structural geologist leading the McMaster Structural Geology and Tectonics Group, in the School of Earth, Environment and Society at McMaster University. I research deformation processes and associated hazards as well as resources. I am particularly interested in rifting and breakup, rift-related magmatism, seismic hazards, and structural inheritance. Geographically, I have worked around the North Atlantic, with a particular emphasis on Eastern Canada. The nature of my work requires a multifaceted approach incorporating a wide variety of approaches and methodologies such as: seismic interpretation, field-based studies, numerical modelling, petrology, structural modelling and geochemistry.

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