I'm Roger Paulen with the Geological Survey of Canada. As a research scientist, my role here is
to increase exploration success for finding buried mineral deposits in northern Canada.
In order to facilitate that, what we do as scientists is surficial mapping and
sampling of the glacial sediments in Canada that mask or bury these mineral deposits.
Back during the last glacial event or the last ice age, ice sheets covered almost all of Canada.
And those ice sheets behave like bulldozers on the landscape. They basically took material from
ore deposits and glacially eroded them, transported them down ice and deposited them
in this pile of glacial debris. And that is all the material that sits on top of the bedrock.
What we do, it's like a reverse detective story.
We find evidence of this debris in the glacial sediments. We follow the glacier path up ice to
hopefully provide information for industry to find these buried ore deposits.
And one of the things we do to do that is we have to sample the soil, sample the streams.
Those samples get processed and we end up finding little pieces of ore.
The ore here was glacially eroded from a specific site somewhere unknown in Canada. It was then
glacially transported. And this is a piece of glacially polished bedrock to show that.
So chunks of ore were literally dragged along and broken into little pieces into the sample,
and then deposited in pieces of varying sizes at any number of distance down ice from that source.
We are working backwards now by going into an area, collecting these samples, and
trying to go back up the glacial flow direction to find a mineral source.
In order for us to determine what's in the glacial sediments, we conduct sampling surveys.
And there's two types of sampling series we do. One is we sample the streams. The streams
erode all of the surficial materials in a given drainage or given catchment, will carry those
materials down river and deposit them at specific features that we look for that will capture
heavy minerals. And heavy minerals are typically ore minerals. So we look for things like sandbars,
point bars, features in the river where faster flowing water will trap these minerals.
Then to follow up, we collect samples of the glacial sediment and we call that till. Now
till is basically the non sorted glacial debris. So the difference between what we
sample and sorted sediment would be: a lake basin would have sorted sediments,
a river valley or a former river system draining a glacier would have sorted sediments.
We wanted stuff that's not sorted. So we know it's only traveled by one mechanism and that is by ice.
So this is a very generalized map of the surface materials of Canada and all these colors represent
in one form or another sediments deposited by the last great ice sheet. We primarily focus for
looking for mineral deposits in areas with known mineral potential. So that would include
the mountains of British Columbia and the Canadian shield where the majority of Canada's mineral
deposits are. So for this study, we focused on a region in the southern northwest territories.
Our study area is this whole area here north of the Alberta and British Columbia border, and on
the east side of Great Slave Lake. We knew there was potential for more deposits in this area,
but exploration was handicapped or limited because there was no bedrock exposed for
prospectors to go and map and explore. The whole area is covered in glacial sediments.
And so we arrive in Yellowknife. Fly down to Hay River. There are major highways that run
through this area. So we did all the work as much as we could by truck. And then we
used a boat on the rivers and for the more inaccessible areas, we flew by helicopter
to get to our sample sites and do our mapping.
So one of the more interesting things about doing this type of research is the opportunity
to work in northern Canada. There are some beautiful remote areas in northern Canada.
It's vast, it's hugely underexplored,
and the potential there is what drives the research. And the research is really exciting,
down the road, when an exploration company takes your data, applies it and actually
finds something of importance or value. That is really gratifying in terms of the science.
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