COVID-19 struck in mid-March, 2020.   Our entire research group spent most of the summer at home, although by mid-June we could access the research labs .  Sabrina Chan completed an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award over the summer, where she worked on writing up her BSc Honours thesis on the Emigrant Pass Volcanic Field.  Her focus was on the Pb, Sr, Nd and Hf isotopic characteristics of the Eocene basaltic andesites through rhyolites exposed in the volcanic field, ranging in age from 38.3 to 36.3 Ma.  Isotopically, the lavas and intrusions form a gorgeous crustal contamination sequence - a manuscript is in the final stages! 

In Fall 2020, Sabrina also started her MSc project, an investigation of the Stone Cabin Formation and caldera in northern Nevada.  The problem was that we could not travel from Ottawa to Nevada to do field work.  Fortunately, Chris Henry had a suite of samples from the Stone Cabin region that Sabrina could get started on.  Sabrina prepped those samples over the late summer and fall of 2020, and completed Pb-Sr-Nd-Hf isotopic work over the winter of 2021.  Terrific results analytically, but our fervent hope is to get into the field in October 2021 to do necessary field work.

Also, a new MSc student will be joining our research group in Fall 2021, Brittany Pegg.  Brittany will be working on a subset of the samples collected during our 2019 Nevada Plutons study.  Another set of rocks from the 2019 collection will form the BSc Honours thesis project for Jacob Sullivan, which he plans to start in Fall 2021.