Global warming provides some of the most dynamic backdrops for climate change scientists at work today. This is especially true for Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) researchers who are on the leading edge, looking to gain a greater understanding of the unsettling effects of climate change.

What do 360-degree virtual reality, the oil and gas sector and threatened boreal caribou have in common? Plenty, it turns out. And especially in Alberta, where work is underway to restore tens of thousands of kilometres of seismic lines — those narrow clear-cut strips found throughout Canada’s boreal forest that were created to help locate oil and natural gas deposits.

Hydrogen — the most abundant element in the world — has the potential to fuel underground mining vehicles, and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) scientists are using its power in new technologies to bring clean energy to the mining industry.

Getting from point A to point B using your smartphone’s web mapping application with the familiar pulsing blue dot is part of our daily lives — thanks to satellite system receivers that use global positioning systems (GPS) to give location and time information. Positioning technology is evolving, and today a typical smartphone can pinpoint a person’s location within a few metres, which is adequate for most personal use. But for a future that includes autonomous driving, precision agriculture and natural disaster early warning systems, centimetre-level accuracy will be crucial.

In a modest laboratory tucked away in Ottawa’s forested suburbs, a team of researchers from Natural Resources Canada is testing new technology that could have a big environmental impact more than 3,000 kilometres away in the Alberta oil sands — direct contact steam generation.

Canada’s boreal caribou are running a race against time. Their numbers have decreased by more than 30 percent over the past 20 years, and they are now officially listed as threatened under the federal Species at Risk Act.

Scientists have long wondered, Why exactly does hydraulic fracturing cause earthquakes in some places but not in others? Now our scientists are a step closer to the answer: new research has found a link between these induced earthquakes and the deformation rate of the tectonic plates.

The western Canadian Arctic has one of the most rapidly changing coastlines in the country. Our research is examining how climate change is affecting this vulnerable coastline.

Natural Resources Canada works with Parks Canada to create a Carbon Atlas.

Media reports of earthquakes often identify their epicentre as a single point on a map. This may be accurate for small earthquakes. But for large ones, the seismic energy is released from a large surface, not a point on a map.