Galen Pippa Halverson

G. Halverson

Archives sédimentaires des
paléoclimats précambriens

McGill
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Pages connexes

I am a stratigrapher, sedimentologist, and isotope geochemist. These specializations, within the broad domain of Earth sciences, allow me to interrogate the stratigraphic record using multiple tools, which I employ to infer tectonic, geographic, and environmental information about the ancient Earth. My research is strongly field-based, with field areas that include northern Canada, Svalbard, the Arabian Peninsula, southwestern Africa, and central Australia. This fieldwork takes my research group to remote and evocative locations and provides both the geological context and the rock samples that drive collaborative, interdisciplinary research with paleobiologists, geochronologists, biogeochemists, climate modellers, and other specialists. This research is aimed principally at understanding Earth system evolution during the Proterozoic Eon, which spanned from 2.5 to 0.54 billion years ago— almost half of Earth’s history. This vast interval of time began with the Great Oxidation Event, when oxygen first accumulated in the atmosphere, spanned the origin of eukaryotes, and concluded when the earliest animals first diversified and colonized the seafloor. Recent topics of enquiry include the timing and environment of early eukaryotic evolution, tectonic setting and geodynamic implications of Proterozoic intracratonic basins, Proterozoic sequence stratigraphy, calibration of the Geologic Time Scale, and application of iron isotope and rare Earth element geochemistry to interpreting redox evolution of the oceans. This research increasingly incorporates astrochronology and probabilistic approaches, including Bayesian inference, in generating stratigraphic age models.