Mo Snyder is an Assistant Professor in the Earth and Environmental Science Department at Acadia University. Mo completed a PhD at the University of Alberta in 2019. They worked on deformation in the Carboniferous rocks in the Maritimes Basin, including soft-sediment deformation, regional mapping, salt tectonics, and fracture histories. Their current research focuses on using a current view on salt tectonics to gain insight into the formation of geohazards. Mo is particularly interested in understanding sinkhole development in Nova Scotia. Recently, their work has focused on using recently published LiDAR data to map sinkholes in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia.
Identifying microbial contributions to aqueous and environmental geochemical processes is a vexing scientific question at the intersection of biogeochemistry and environmental science. Many geological processes, such as groundwater chemistry, Earth’s chemical evolution, climate, and global element cycles are tightly coupled with evolution and energy transfer carried out by microbial and biological processes. Nuanced understanding these geological processes requires understanding the energetic and mass action contributions of microbes.
New developments for in situ environmental instruments are making it possible to record biogeochemical processes in real-time, teasing apart contributions from microbial and abiotic geochemical reactions, as they are happening. Distinguishing between microbial and abiotic mass transfer has implications for origins of life research, understanding of mineralogical and isotopic signatures in the rock record, and the search for life beyond Earth.
Allison is an Assistant Professor in the Earth Sciences Department at UNB – Fredericton. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto in 2015. Her PhD work focused on electrochemical agnostic biosignatures. Her research program is focused on in situ sensor-based monitoring strategies for geochemical and microbial environmental processes.
Science Atlantic is a proud member of:
