Michelle Hanson
I began my academic career with a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Regina. While completing these studies, I discovered that my interests lay elsewhere, and thus concurrently completed a B.Sc. Honours in Geography. My honours thesis studied the nature and distribution of the periglacial landforms of Igloolik Island, Nunavut.
During my undergraduate fieldwork, I fell in love with the Arctic and thus decided to continue research there with graduate studies in Earth Sciences at the University of Alberta. My M.Sc. thesis addressed the late Quaternary style of glaciation and deglaciation, the subsequent Holocene relative sea level history, as well as the recent coastal submergence of northeast Melville Island, Nunavut. The study involved geomorphological mapping, stratigraphic and sedimentological analysis of exposures, and construction of relative sea level curves and isobases based on radiocarbon-dated samples collected from raised marine deposits.
I began my Ph.D. in the Department of Earth Sciences at Simon Fraser University in January 2004. The focus of my Ph.D. research is on constraining the chronology and mechanisms of repeated outburst floods from glacial Lake Missoula, Montana, during the last glaciation. The project has involved detailed stratigraphic and sedimentological study of exposures of lacustrine and flood sediments, as well as the construction of paleomagnetic secular variation curves to correlate among these different exposures in Montana, Washington, and Oregon. I am also completing a detailed rock magnetic study of both lacustrine and flood sediments, which is further helping to clarify depositional methods and timing within individual flood events. There is a paucity of radiocarbon-datable material in these exposures, hence I am using optical luminescence methods to date these events.
- Recent Publications
- Lajeunesse, P. and Hanson, M. (in press). Field observations of recent transgression on northern and eastern Melville Island, western Canadian High Arctic. Geomorphology.
- Hanson, M.A., Barendregt, R., Clague, J.J., and Enkin, R.J. 2007. Stratigraphic and paleomagnetic study of glacial Lake Missoula lacustrine and flood sediments. American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, California.
- Education
- M.Sc., Earth Sciences 2003 University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB
- B.Sc. (Hons.), Geography 2000 University of Regina, Regina, SK
- B.A., Political Science 2000 University of Regina, Regina, SK
For more information, please send e.mail to: mhanson@sfu.ca
