Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.
Dr. Charles Greer
April 23, 2014 at 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
| Location: | 4440Q Carleton Technology and Training Centre |
| Cost: | Free |
| Audience: | Anyone |
| Key Contact: | Iain Lambert |
| Contact Email: | iain.lambert@carleton.ca |
Environmental monitoring in the Arctic: exploitation of natural resources and its implications
Dr. Charles Greer
Energy, Mining and Environment
National Research Council Canada Montreal, Quebec
And Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University
Wednesday, April 23rd at 3:00 pm in CTTC 4440Q
Faculty Host: Iain Lambert
Abstract
The exploration and exploitation of oil, gas and mineral resources in Canada’s Arctic carries with it certain risks that include the potential for oil spills and the release of different types of contamination including heavy metals, all of which have the potential to cause serious impacts on this fragile, yet extreme ecosystem. In addition to developing cost-effective, efficient methods to treat and dispose of organic and inorganic wastes, these methods must be adaptable to the local environmental conditions, which in the high Arctic, include only about 2 months per year when temperatures are above freezing. One particular challenge is to develop an effective response strategy for potential oil spills in an Arctic marine environment that would consist of a mixture of seawater and sea ice. Since microorganisms play a crucial role in many environmental processes including the degradation of organic pollutants such as hydrocarbons, developing a better understanding of their population structures, distribution, and functional capacity to address these challenges is an essential objective.
Combining high-throughput environmental genomics techniques with traditional microbiological and chemical methods is proving to be an extremely versatile approach to achieving this objective. Analysis of natural microbial populations in the marine and soil environments in the high Arctic is demonstrating the diversity and capacity of the indigenous communities to degrade environmental pollutants and is providing insight into the conditions that facilitate or even stimulate this activity.
Examples of monitoring of marine and soil environments will be presented that demonstrate how these approaches are generating valuable data to help in developing bioremediation and biodegradation strategies to cope with one of the main pollutants in the Arctic, petroleum hydrocarbons. How indigenous microbial population structures and functions change in response to contamination events and subsequent treatments, show how versatile and adaptable the indigenous microorganisms are in these extreme environments, and provide potential solution options, should these contamination events occur.