OCGC-Logan Club Seminar Series: Dr. John Jamieson
Talk Title: Evaluating the rates of ore-forming processes on the seafloor
The next OCGC-Logan Club seminar talk will take place on February 3, 2022 at 11:30 a.m at the University of Ottawa – via Zoom. The seminar will be featuring Dr. John Jamieson, an associate professor of Marine Geology at Memorial University, as well as one of the iMAGE-CREATE principal investigators. An abstract of the seminar and biography follow;
Abstract: The rates of formation of volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits can be evaluated by investigating actively forming hydrothermal deposits on the modern seafloor. High-resolution bathymetric mapping combined with U-series geochronology allow for deposit accumulation rates to be constrained. However, to accurately interpret these data, it is necessary to understand if venting has been continuous or episodic over the history of the deposit’s formation. The results of monitoring of several vent fields over years to decades indicate relatively stable, continuous venting over these timespans. However, many vent fields are older than 10,000 or even 100,000 years, and dating of sulfide-rich samples using U-series disequilibrium techniques can provide insights into both the age and the continuity or episodicity of venting. However, the often low number of collected and dated samples results in age distributions that contain significant time gaps that could be interpreted as evidence of either continuous or episodic venting, which will have a profound effect on the assessment of potential instantaneous deposit growth rates and metal fluxes. In this talk, I will discuss our current understanding of the ages and growth rates of seafloor hydrothermal deposits, and present a statistical approach for evaluating the probability of episodicity from the determined age spectrum for several hydrothermal vent fields on the seafloor.
Bio: “I received my B.Sc. at the University of Alberta in 2002, M.Sc. at the University of Maryland in 2005, and Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa in 2013. In between degrees I worked as a resource geologist for the Alberta Geological Survey and explored for gold in Nunavut and British Columbia with Cumberland Resources. Between 2013 and 2016 I worked as a research scientist in the Marine Mineral Resources Group at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, in Kiel, Germany. Since 2016, I have been at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s, where I am a Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Marine Geology. My research focuses on submarine hydrothermal systems, marine mineral resources, and seafloor exploration. I have participated on 17 research cruises to investigate hydrothermal systems and mineral deposit formation hosted in diverse tectonic settings and ocean basins.”
For access to the zoom link, please see the email circulated via. the CREATE email list, or contact us using the form at the bottom of the page.
