Mark Nelson

My deep interest for the outdoors and for earth science started at a young age with exploring the Cambrian sand cliffs of the Eau Claire River back in my home state of Wisconsin. It was amplified by traveling through and exploring the natural areas of the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the West Indies.

Early in my academic career I obtained a degree in Civil Engineering. Upon graduation I took a job for an engineering consulting firm. My duties of running construction sites and heading surveying projects were jobs that I was very capable of, but I lacked serious interest in them. I realized that I was in the wrong profession and that I needed to take a new career path - one that would lead me back to the natural world, one without blacktop, concrete, or sewer pipes.

I enrolled at the University of Eau Claire-Wisconsin were I received a BSc as a double major in Physical Geography and Geology. At UWEC I participated in and contributed to many under graduate research projects including: mapping the main channel of the Chippewa River by a GPS and total station surveys, interpretation of low altitude aerial photographs and LandSAT images; studying the distribution of buried podzolic soils and characterizing the spatial relationship between them and archaeological material in the Glacial Lake Hind Basin (GLHB) in southwestern Manitoba for two summers; and bedrock mapping/economic mineral exploration in the Coast Mountains of British Columbia. It was a passion for research and the earth sciences that led me to purse a MSc in Natural Hazards.

In September of 2007 I began a MSc in the Department of Earth Sciences, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. My thesis project involves identifying and establishing a chronology of large sediment pulses from the Southern Alps, New Zealand related to landslides and landslide dams using geophysical techniques and a sedimentological and stratigraphic analysis.

For more information, please send e.mail to: mcn8@sfu.ca