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17 Sep 2018Metal Earth Annual Report 2017-2018
Metal Earth: A Global Initiative
Annual Report 2017-2018
This annual report represents the work completed in Years 1 and 2 (March 2017-April 2018), the period marking the beginning of Metal Earth, a seven-year, $104 million applied R&D program. This global initiative is a strategic consortium of 25 Canadian and international (United States, Australia, and Germany) researchers from academia, government and industry, and led by the Mineral Exploration Research Centre (MERC), part of the Harquail School of Earth Sciences (HSES) at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario.
The Metal Earth program was made possible with $49.2 million in funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF), the largest geoscience grant in Canadian history, $5 million in funding from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC), a $1 million donation from the (David) Harquail family’s Midas Touch Foundation, and cash and in-kind contributions from 22 private sector and government survey partners. Year 1 and 2 activities included the hiring of a Chair in Exploration Targeting; faculty science leaders in Precambrian geology, earth systems modelling, and exploration geophysics; 6 international postdoctoral fellows, 1 Canadian and 4 international research associates; and 2 GIS visualisation specialists, an information technologist, and a database manager, all of which reside at Laurentian University. Metal Earth also facilitated the hiring of a faculty member at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, one of our partner institutions.
Projects undertaken from March 2017-April 2018 were led by research associates, postdoctoral fellows, Ph.D. and M.Sc. students supervised by Metal Earth faculty and science leaders. This report contains scientific background and progress reviews of all Metal Earth research activities conducted during Year 1 and 2, followed by an overview of upcoming research projects.
