South Rae Success Stories

GEM BSc student wins Best Paper award at Yellowknife Geoscience Forum 2017

Benjamin Neil, a BSc student supervised by Dr. Sally Pehrsson of GSC and Dr. Dan Gibson of Simon Fraser University has won the Northwest Territories Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists (NAPEG) best talk award at the 2017 Yellowknife Geoscience Forum, held this past November 14-16. NAPEG awarded the prize, and a $1000.00 cash award, annually to eligible BSc, MSc, or PhD students presenting at the conference. Ben’s talk entitled: “Provenance, regional correlations and tectonic significance of the Porter Lake and Lynx Lake Outliers, South Rae Craton, Northwest Territories” presented the results of field mapping and age dating he completed in 2016 as part of GEM2’s South Rae activity. His work on these newly discovered sedimentary rocks shows that the fluvial to lacustrine sediments were sourced nearby from very ancient crust and were being deposited at the Earth’s surface at the same time as adjacent rocks lay buried to near 45 km depth, in a setting analogous to modern day basins forming adjacent to the Nanga Parbat syntaxis in the western Himalaya.