4/15/13

Geologist to Speak at St. Lawrence April 18

CANTON - Richard Ernst, scientist-in-residence in the Department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University, will give the 2013 Susan Caroline Ferguson Memorial Lecture in Geology on Thursday, April 18, at 7:30 p.m. in St. Lawrence University’s Hepburn Hall, Room 218. The talk, “Extreme Volcanism through Time: From the Sahara to the High Arctic and to Other Planets,” is open to the public, free of charge.

Ernst will share the stories of regularly occurring intense and mega-volcanic events both on the Earth and other planets and how they have caused the breakup of continents and the extinction of many species due to extreme climate variations.

After earning his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, Ernst was attracted north to Canada by geological field research opportunities and received his master’s from the University of Toronto in 1981, and his Ph.D. from Carleton University in 1989. He did extensive work with the Geological Survey of Canada before starting his consulting firm, “Ernst Geosciences,” joining Carleton University as an adjunct professor and becoming a co-leader of the Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs) Commission of IAVCEI (International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior).

In 2009, Ernst co-launched a consortium of industry sponsors contributing $1.5 million toward using the LIP’s record to determine the arrangement of crustal blocks within supercontinents back through time. In April 2012, he was awarded $700,000 in matching funding from a Canadian government research grant to support graduate student research on LIPs in his position at Carleton University.

The Susan Caroline Ferguson Memorial Lecture in Geology is given annually to commemorate the life of Ferguson, a St. Lawrence student who tragically passed away in 1982. Her parents and friends established a memorial fund in her honor that has been utilized to bring an exceptional geoscientist to St. Lawrence each academic year to present the lecture.