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magazine / jun08
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June 2008 issue |
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RESEARCH
Toxic track record
Growing up in Marion Bridge, near Sydney, N.S., Hannah MacDonald heard a lot of stories about and controversy
over the Sydney Tar Ponds, one of Canada's most notorious toxic-waste sites. A century of steelmaking and coke production left more than a million tonnes of contaminated soil and sediment in the Muggah Creek Estuary
and three other sites, along with lingering questions about its effect on the health of residents.
Now an environmental science student at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, N.B., MacDonald,
21, is still preoccupied with the environmental legacy of the tar ponds. She searched
for company records on the steel mill's emissions but was unsuccessful. “The steel plant was on the go for 99 years,
but there's no real record of how much pollution was in the area at any one time,” she says. “I wanted to find out
how much pollution was in the Sydney area when I was growing up and when my parents and grandparents
were growing up.”
MacDonald is instead using dendrochemistry — the study of the chemical composition
of tree rings to track air pollution and other environmental changes over time — to understand the extent and
plume of airborne pollutants from the steel plant. A region's environmental history is locked within tree rings, she
says. “As far as I can tell, it's the best way to see into the past accurately.”
With the assistance of a research grant from The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, MacDonald travelled to Sydney last summer to collect pencil-thin core samples from the most common tree species in the city,
including white birch, larch and balsam fir. She started on the grounds of the steel mill (which closed in 2001 and
has since been dismantled) and collected samples at 20 sites within a five-kilometre radius of the plant.
She has dated tree rings and analyzed their chemical makeup to detect levels of five heavy metals emitted from
the plant: lead, zinc, arsenic, copper and thallium. (So far, she has found lead, zinc and copper in the samples.)
Preliminary results show that white birch, a hardwood, picked up more lead and zinc than did softwood trees.
MacDonald also noted a decrease in heavy-metal levels after 1988, when the plant’s coke ovens were shut down.
MacDonald’s data collection will lay the foundation for her fourth-year honours research project, which she
will start in the fall. Her goal is to create a map of Sydney showing how concentrations of heavy metals
throughout the city have changed over time.
— Monique Roy-Sole
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RESEARCH
The dating game
It seems fitting that Felicia Pickard chose to study tree rings at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B.
As a child in Woodstock, N.B., she helped her dad harvest and prepare Christmas trees for sale.
The tree rings she studied last summer weren’t of the Christmas variety, however.
They were from an eastern white pine dugout canoe uncovered in 2003 on a beach at Val-Comeau, in northeastern New Brunswick, one of the few large First Nations’ artifacts found in the province.
Dating the canoe “allowed me to learn more about the First Nations’ history of my province,” says the fourth-year
biology major and recipient of a research grant from The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, “as well as travel
throughout the province, see historic sites and meet people.”
The dugout was estimated to be 440 years old, give or take 50 years, but the New Brunswick Museum in Saint
John wanted to determine its exact age before putting it on permanent display.
Pickard and her colleagues set out to create a New Brunswick white pine master chronology of tree-ring
growth that went back in time far enough to compare with the canoe’s rings.
They analyzed samples from historical buildings and live trees throughout New Brunswick but did not find
anything old enough to date the dugout. Pickard then looked to Nova Scotia, where she was able to compare the
canoe’s rings with those of an Acadian sluice from the Grand Pré region. In the end, she concluded the canoe
was crafted around 1557.
The New Brunswick Museum plans to display the dugout next summer, once preservation treatments
are complete.
— Erin Kristalyn
MAGAZINE
Honour roll
Winnipeg photographer Mike Grandmaison won second prize in the photography category of
the Canadian Tourism Commission’s Northern Lights Awards in April for his splendid scenics of Jasper National Park in “Jasper
by starlight” (CG Travel Summer 2007).
Journalist Alex Roslin, who is based in Lac-Brome, Que., has been nominated for a Canadian Association of
Journalists (CAJ) award for outstanding investigative journalism in the magazine category for “The 1,000-mile diet” (CG Nov/Dec 2007).
Roslin examined the challenges and cost of shipping fresh food by mail to isolated northern communities. Winners of the CAJ awards were to be announced on May 24.
— M.R.-S.
EDUCATION
The North at their fingertips
Students can now track icebergs and explore diamond mining in Canada’s Arctic — right from the classroom.
To recognize International Polar Year (IPY), the Canadian
Council for Geographic Education, in collaboration with the Canadian Polar Commission, has developed a set of 38
bilingual lesson plans about the North.
Designed by teachers for teachers, the plans are intended to introduce students from kindergarten to grade 12 to Arctic issues and to inspire the next generation of polar scientists. While IPY, a worldwide scientific initiative focused on the Arctic and Antarctic regions, will end in March 2009, the hands-on
lesson plans (available at www.ccge.org) are meant to serve well into the future. Classes across the country can discover northern realities and challenges through such engaging topics as Inuit shamanism and spirituality and the impact of global warming on polar bear habitat.
— E.K.
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