Lauren A. Walker

When I fist set foot on the shores of the west coast some time ago, I knew I had come to the right place. After growing up in Ontario, the ocean, mountains and forests of the coast seemed like one big playground. I did however need a means to keep me here, so I jumped into school at the University of Victoria and eventually completed my BSc in Earth and Ocean Sciences. Near to the end of my degree I began to be drawn up the Quaternary path, by working on several projects including the reconstruction of past fluctuations of the Saskatchewan Glacier in Banff National Park, and unravelling Late Pleistocene and Holocene climate change on Effingham Island in Barkley Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

After completing my degree, I decided that I hadn't quite had enough of the Quaternary world and decided to start my MSc degree here at SFU. In making the move, I again expanded my playground and have been fortunate to work in several great locations within the Coast Mountains of B.C. and the St. Elias Mountains in the Yukon.

This past summer I spent time in the Coast Mountains, investigating pre-Little Ice Age glaciation in the alpine environment at three sites: Lillooet Glacier (photo), Diadem Glacier (Mt. Queen Bess) (photo), and Berendon Glacier (photo). My fieldwork focussed on the mapping of several moraine segments found outside Little Ice Age limits at each site, and the sampling of boulders (photo) for cosmogenic dating to determine age of deposition. I also cored moraine-dammed ponds (photo) at the Lillooet and Berendon Glaciers, which will be used to tie in associated climate change using palynology. This work will hopefully help to clarify the Late Pleistocene/Holocene record of glacier fluctuations in the Coast Mountains of B.C., and the effects of such fluctuations on the alpine environment.

Education

B.Sc.(Hons.), Earth and Ocean Sciences 2001 University of Victoria, Victoria, BC