BU geology department celebrates 110 years
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/03/2021 (1724 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Brandon University is using Provincial Engineering and Geoscience Week, which runs until Sunday, to highlight how far its geology department has come since the school started teaching geoscience 110 years ago.
Of course, department chair Hamid Mumin recently told the Sun that although the rocks and minerals they study haven’t changed throughout the past century, geoscience itself is constantly evolving and BU is doing its best to keep pace.
For example, BU added an environmental geoscience stream in 2019 to stay relevant with an industry that is increasingly relying on green technology.
“And green technologies require sophisticated high tech metals and minerals,” Mumin said on Friday. “So the industry is in fact expanding, even throughout COVID.”
Of course, Mumin laments the fact that BU’s geology department won’t be able to celebrate this 110-year milestone the way they would like, since the COVID-19 pandemic is hampering their ability to organize a major conference or their usual research expeditions that take place across the country.
“That’s certainly been a set back for students this current year,” he said. “We haven’t been able to do a lot of what we normally do in terms of field trips and professional development programs we get involved in.”
However, Mumin remains excited for everything the BU geology department can accomplish moving into the future, especially since they plan to add stratigraphy and palaeontology streams to their programming as well.
For right now, Mumin said geoscience students can at least look forward to a fall 2021 lecture from geology graduate Melissa Anderson, whose time at BU directly led to a teaching and research position at the University of Toronto.
But until then, the department chair is confident that the mining and energy sector will be able to endure and provide ample job opportunities for graduates, given all the changes he has witnessed in the industry throughout his career.
“The demand doesn’t go down. It actually evolves and expands over time,” he said. “Now we’re looking at new energy minerals like lithium and cobalt and graphite … they’re all becoming increasingly more important in society for energy efficiency.”
Brandon University was first established in 1889.
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