Summary
In episode 6 of Beneath Your Feet, A Geoscience Podcast, host Veronica Klassen interviews resource geologist Mary-Anne Hildebrandt. Mary-Anne discusses her roundabout path to geoscience, unique career journey, and focus on sustainability throughout her career. Mary-Anne and Veronica discuss the perception of geoscience as a ‘fluffy’ science and how including geoscientists in conversation can benefit organizations. Mary-Anne provides insight into the role of geoscience in moving from a linear to a circular economy and how understanding the energy and value of a consumable good can help us to waste less.
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Introduction
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Beneath Your Feet, a geoscience podcast. I’m Veronica Klassen, science communicator, geology enthusiast and your host. Here at the APGO Education Foundation, our mission is to spark curiosity and passion for the geology of Ontario. Whether you’re a geology nerd, science enthusiast, or nature lover, this podcast is for you. Join us as we geek out over fascinating geology, uncover the hidden stories
and secrets of our extraordinary planet and explore the captivating world beneath your feet.
Veronica Klassen: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode! Today I’m going to be talking to Mary-Anne Hildebrandt, a resource geologist and past president of PGO. Mary-Anne has a BSc in Geological and Earth Sciences, a BA in Political Studies, and a Master of Earth and Energy Resource Leadership, where she did her thesis in waste and the circular economy. So we’ll be discussing the perception of geoscience in society, advice for young students, how to choose what to study, and the role of geoscience in moving away from increasing waste and towards a circular economy. Welcome Mary-Anne. Thanks so much for being with me. Why don’t you start by telling us a bit about yourself?
Mary-Anne Hildebrandt: So, Veronica, it’s so great to be here today. I’m a resource geology manager at Stellar Gold. And what that means is that we’re creating the three dimensional models and estimates that will be used for potentially the development into a mining project down the road. We’re a junior exploration company. A bit about myself I studied at Queen’s quite a long time ago now. I’ve been in the industry for, I guess, 17 years, it seems like it’s gone by in a flash, but it’s been a lot of different fun opportunities over the course of that time. So you know, I started in exploration, was in production, mining, environment for quite a number of years, almost ten years. And I’m back at exploration again.
Veronica: Amazing. Thanks so much. You’ve been doing so many different things. I think that’s that’s awesome. So with that, if you’re talking to students who are maybe considering going into geoscience or who are just deciding what they do want to study or what they want to go into and consider as their career options. What would be the best piece of advice you would have for students trying to figure out what they want to do?
Mary-Anne: I think with geoscience, like there’s so many different pathways to doing because geoscience is used in in many ways people don’t even realize. Right? Field based part is probably the most visible. But then there’s also the regulatory space with geoscientists working within government and other conservation authorities that are doing work to protect the public. And then there’s the Bay Street Geoscientists, and they could be analysts that are giving advice to investors. Right. And same on the security side, geoscientists that sit within securities, again, a city based position that is that’s creating protection for investors on the stock market. And there’s just so many different ways you can do geoscience. And it’s it’s incredible really, how many opportunities there are. If that answers your question.
Veronica: Yes, no it does. And I think that there are so many different ways that you can do geoscience and people might not consider that as students. I guess as like as student would you recommend them like looking into like a wide variety of options or just like starting kind of with the basics and going from there, or how would you recommend them sort of like approaching that?
Mary-Anne: I think as students, you know, there are sort of two ways to go about being a student, right? You’re either a student that knows exactly where they’re going, and I don’t know how many students really are those people. And then there’s the students that, you know, might start their university career in one direction and choose something else. I’m one of those students myself. I actually started my first degree, my first major was in political science. It wasn’t in geoscience. And it’s not because I didn’t appreciate geoscience. I didn’t really know much about it where I came from. You’re either a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or a nurse. That was the things that are my career counselors talked to our high school students about. And I happened to have been always curious about rocks and nature and whatnot and, and the intersection of society and, you know, the natural environment. And because of that, I had more and more of my projects in my first major were geared with an underlying sort of conversation around society’s obligations regarding the natural environment. And, you know, I had been chatting with my closer friends and they were like, why don’t you take a geoscience course as an elective? And that’s what I did. And it was out of that elective that I realized I really liked that discipline. I felt like I was home. And it was the professor of that course that contacted me amongst a group of other folks over the summertime and said, why don’t you come back to the university and do a degree in geoscience? That was Dr Jean Hutchinson that did that. And and sure enough, I went back and did geoscience degree and here I am.
Veronica: That’s awesome that you found it through yeah your friends recommending it.
Mary-Anne: Well, that’s the thing is that, you know, I think the key thing for students is to really explore who you are, what aligns well with you. And when you do have that moment where you feel like you’re at home, and you’ll know what that feeling is when you feel it, that pursue that and if you pursue it, you will be probably very, very happy in the end.
Veronica: Yeah. I love the way that you put that. When you feel at home, that’s a really great way to to understand that. So what, in your opinion, is the most exciting thing about working in geoscience?
Mary-Anne: I think the beauty of geoscience as a profession is that you really can sort of choose your own adventure. I’d like to say where I thought I, you know, started and where I am now. I would never have predicted because you start, you know, usually coming out of university, you’re doing maybe if you’re in the economic kind of realm, which is where I’ve been in industry, you do a lot of drilling and sampling and and looking at drill core and logging. And you have at that time you might think, oh, is this all there is? But then as time goes on and you get experience, maybe you have different opportunities at different projects and different rock types and getting to get a few more skills under your belt, you get opportunities coming along. I would never have predicted that I would be leading a resource team in an exploration company, because I spent such a long time in mining that I really thought, okay, this is sort of where my niche market is, and this is where I’m going to spend the rest of my career. But, you know, things happen and you get new opportunities and, and just a new chance to sort of evolve and go down a different path.
Veronica: I love that. That’s awesome. Yeah. I do agree that there’s such a wide variety of things that you can do within geoscience as well, that like no two jobs are the same and there’s, there’s so much variety in that. So that’s also one of the things that I love about geoscience. Okay. So what for you, what is a day in the life look like as a geoscientist?
Mary-Anne: For me right now, I lead a team of geologists that cover a variety of different topics, from land tenure and GIS to resource modeling and also data, database administration. So I engage with my team fairly regularly. We collaborate with other branches within. So there’s another team that’s led doing interpretation and logging. And we work closely with that group to try and sort of really get a better understanding of the deposit so that we can de-risk our models. But also, you know, produce new opportunities, new ideas around, well, what is the deposit doing over there? Maybe we should put some drilling, you know, there or have we done any work that could support an idea that that the deposit extends in that direction? You know, how do we build a business case to do that? And then the other side of it, yeah, I said data, data administration. We live in data. We’re very much focused on, you know, what’s the quality of the information coming in. How can we best utilise it? What software do we need? Part of my role is also investigating other innovative approaches that we can use, and new technology that’s available on the market to make our work done quicker with better quality and more robust data sets.
Veronica: Okay. Awesome. So essentially you’re looking at data that’s collected. Are you organizing how that data is collected as well?
Mary-Anne: It’s sort of a joint effort. So the interpretation team, there’s a principal geologist, George Speratus, who does the guiding of how we’re doing logging. Right. And on my team we’re looking at how how should we be, what’s our best practice around sampling and doing collecting assay data, geochemistry data. But it’s a joint effort between the two teams. We have a very talented group of people in both groups. And you know, we’re open to listening to our ideas and coming up with the best plan for for what we’re trying to deliver.
Veronica: Okay, cool, cool. It sounds like it involves a lot of curiosity, like asking questions and troubleshooting figuring things out. Would you say that’s the case?
Mary-Anne: Curiosity is probably the best word. That is, if you’re a person that’s curious by nature, this is the profession for you.
Veronica: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. What is the most surprising thing about working as a geoscientist that you think that people don’t really know about?
Mary-Anne: Gosh, I think people have a perception of what a geologist is, perhaps that they’ve picked up through reading about them or or seeing movies about them. And I don’t know that any of those portrayals really accurately portray what, what geoscience looks like and who geoscientists are. And, you know, we’re such a diverse, unique group of individuals. At the core of it, we’re scientists that happened to study the Earth. We’re so curious about the Earth, its systems and and whatever project we happen to be working on, we’re not in isolation, right? We think about other aspects of our work. How does our work impact the the environment? How does it impact the communities that are nearby or further downstream? We try and think about these pieces and try and create a holistic model in what we’re doing. Right. So we’re very much in touch with how our work is should be done as a best practice, as a science, but also the impact it has on others.
Veronica: Awesome. Yeah, I definitely agree. It’s like not yeah, not just about the science. So with that, if you could, what would you change about the perception of geoscience in society?
Mary-Anne: I think a perception that we need to overcome is that all we can tell you is like if, for example, from an economic geology perspective, all we can tell you is whether or not the deposit is has this many ounces and this many tons in it. We can, when brought to the table and allowed to engage fully as professionals, we can bring a lot of information to support the larger goals that society or a company has. And what I often find is that in in certain organizations that you don’t have that sort of collaborative spirit. And when you exclude one of one side of your professionals from the table, you lose that perspective on it and lose opportunity more than likely for some sort of potential growth, either financially or in some other manner that would be intrinsic to your shareholders. Then the other side of it, you have the possibility that you’ll end up having carrying greater risk in that project than than you then you would have had you included the geoscientists at the table.
Veronica: Okay. So essentially, we’re losing an opportunity if we’re not including geoscientists in conversations around, specifically when we’re talking about Earth and environment and sustainability, things like that. And you feel that sometimes geoscience is excluded because it’s not considered as like a, as, a relevant field, I guess. Does that make any sense?
Mary-Anne: Well, I think it’s just go back to the perception. If you think about Big Bang Theory, I don’t know if you’ve ever watched it, but you have like this core group of physicists and, and other types of engineers and whatnot in that group. And their perception that they’ve portrayed of geoscience is sort of like it’s a pseudo fluffy science, not really appreciating the fact that, yes, we’re not the pure sort of traditional sense of science because there’s a lot of gray areas in what we do. But the methods that we take to, you know, to do our work, the approaches that we take are based on scientific theory and, you know, improving a theory. We go through the same thing. We have a hypothesis or a model. We determine a relevant program or approach to test that model. And then we test the model. And then we come back with our findings and then we say, oh, the model was not great. It needs to be changed here. And we go back again and we say, okay, new hypothesis. This is what the new model looks like. And then we go through the same sort of iterative process of scientific discovery, just like any other other science, scientific approach. We’re not always portrayed publicly in the same sort of context as other scientific pursuits.
Veronica: Yeah. No, definitely. I agree, I think geosciences is sometimes looked at as not as like serious. So yeah, I agree that that is a perception that we would like to change. And it’s just not accurate. So it’s not about the way people perceive it, but it’s about actually being accurate to what the science is.
Veronica: I just want to loop back to the conversation about sustainability. And I feel like one of the things that I find a lot is that people just associate geoscience with mining or yeah, kind of like extraction, things like that. Which is obviously not the case. However, I do want to just touch about, talk about sustainability and how we can do better in some ways. How do you see the current issues in geoscience or mining with regards to sustainability, and what are the things that we can do about it?
Mary-Anne: Well, I think on the sustainability piece it’s something that every, every person should be trying to engage in regardless of what they’re doing in their life. And how can we reduce our impact on the environment wherever possible? I haven’t met a person anywhere, it doesn’t matter where I’ve been in this world, that that doesn’t want to have clean air to breathe, clean environment to, to allow, you know, to participate and have their maybe their children or their family go to visit and have clean water to drink. Right? I haven’t met that person that wouldn’t value those three things. So when we look at the world around us and we have to think how we can participate in making sure that those three pillars are, are kept for future generations. Geoscience, you know, has a unique role in that space. Because you’re right, we are very much we’re either directly involved in the extractive industries. So oil and gas or mining or we’re directly involved in the regulation of those industries. So either through environment, environmental, Geoscientists, hydrogeologists and so on. And we’re playing sort of both, both roles in our industry and as professionals, we’re obligated to ensure that we are respectful and we consider the welfare of society and the natural environment. So things that we find challenging, or at least I see that as challenging for society, is that geoscientists could play more of a role in this conversation than we currently do.
Mary-Anne: And in part of the way the reason we do is because, again, those perceptions that sort of sit out there of what a geologist can do or offer are fairly narrow. When we have a lot of information that we could share to build plans for more robust ways of doing things that that would lend themselves to developing more of a circular economy. So the idea right now, if you think about it, you have mines that are producing minerals as raw materials for the production of consumer products and then those consumer products at some point down the road, the consumer will decide, oh, I don’t need this anymore, and I’m going to put it at a local landfill. Right? We’re getting better as citizens of the world in terms of reusing and reducing, but it’s not intrinsic in what we do when we actually go off and extract these raw minerals. We don’t necessarily, and we’re putting them into a consumer product, our manufacturing sector, although they’re doing better, they’re not necessarily thinking about, okay, how at the end of the life cycle of that consumer product, can we reuse all of these materials for the reproduction of a new consumer product?
Mary-Anne: There are companies that are doing that, they are thinking along those lines. But if you look in the broad scope of the numbers of companies that are doing that internationally, it’s really only a handful that have a marketing scheme that’s like that and a manufacturing plant that’s like that. So we need to start changing how we think about these products. Part of the way we can do that is thinking about the time and energy that society has put into extracting those minerals and the oil and gas and energy and natural gas and other other products that are used in the manufacture of other things. If we actually had the value of that and understood that value, you know, of what it is to have, let’s say, the Tim Hortons coffee cup, you know, if we understood that value, we may not be as quick to dispose of it. I know there’s a lot of campaigns actually online. If you see every now and then there’s a campaign to explain all the raw minerals that are sitting in your cell phone. We still don’t fully, you know, go through that recycling, reusing process for the cell phone, which we could.
Veronica: Yeah for sure. And especially with cell phones, there’s, you know, so many of them that yeah, we’re not really taking into account the fact that these are things that have had so much time and energy in order to make them in order to just to manufacture those things. And we really don’t think about them as soon as we throw them out.
Mary-Anne: No. And what a shame it is. Going back to the concept of the three pillars of the water, air, and the sort of natural beauty of the environment. Going back to that concept is every time we pull these raw minerals out of the ground, we’re disrupting the ground somewhere in somebody’s home. We should be cognizant of that. And I know the mining industry, they’re you know, they’re forever trying to create more ways to be surgical in their approach to mining, creating smaller footprints. And that’s fantastic because, you know, you may not have these large scale operations that really are quite disruptive to the ground. But on the other hand, we also need mining to live as a society. So if folks on there listening to this want to go off and research it, you go to the World Bank’s website and they have a lot of literature there about the two Earth, the concept of the two Earths, and, and essentially what they’re forecasting. If we continue along the path of materials that we’re consuming as a global society, that by 2030, we will have exhausted not only the resources needed to support our current Earth, but need the resources of another Earth to to offer this.
Veronica: Just a quick correction the actual projected year is 2050, not 2030. A report released in 2006 by the World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) and the Global Footprint Network found that by 2050, we will have used up the resources of two Earths. The most current release, the Living Planet Report from 2024, doesn’t use the same measure of the two Earths, but it does report that wildlife populations have decreased by 73% and that many systems are very close to tipping points, which will lead to trophic cascades and irreversible damage. You can find the most current Living Planet Report at livingplanet.panda.org or head to footprintnetwork.org to measure your ecological footprint. Point is that we are using up Earth’s resources in an extremely unsustainable way.
Mary-Anne: But what that could lead to is scarcity and which is hard to believe, especially in a country such as Canada where we have an abundance of fresh water, of mineral resources, of good fruit and veg and arable land. It’s hard to even think about the concept of scarcity. It’s sort of foreign to us. The only time, from my perspective in my family where they talked about scarcity is the generation that lived through the 1930s. And in an international context there are countries right now that do live under the idea of scarcity, and they’re being quite innovative in how they they meet that challenge. We as a global society need to be thinking in those terms that yes, we are, we are abundant perhaps now, but if we continue down one path and we don’t do something about it, and we don’t find ways to be better stewards of our environment, we could be in a position that would create some really challenging power dynamics for society that who knows what would come of that? And if nothing else, it will mean that there’s going to be more need for geoscientists down the road, because we’re going to need geoscientists to find all of these resources to feed the engine of society.
Veronica: Oh man. It’s so, so challenging. And like you said, we need geoscientists. And I think we need geoscientists to come up with solutions.
Veronica: I just want to jump in here real quick and just add that of course many many Canadians do not live in an abundance mindset. And although Canada does have access to a lot of resources and a lot of beautiful nature it is not easily accessible to a lot of Canadians and those resources are not equally divided amongst society. And so geoscientists need to make sure they are not extracting in a way that is not reflective of the attitude and experience of many if not most Canadians. So yeah I just wanted to add that. Now back to the episode.
Veronica: Yeah. So how do you think that geoscience is positioned in order to help support sustainability and things like the circular economy?
Mary-Anne: So I think geoscientists have the unique ability that they can understand Earth systems and Earth processes and identify other ways of doing. So they can be part of the conversations of finding resources we never expected. They will be challenged as a profession to meet that demand. So going back to resources that maybe we haven’t felt were viable in the past for economic extraction, we’re going to have to go back to them and find a business case that will make them. So, not just an economic geologist, in this conversation, you’re going to need geoscientists like structural geologists and environmental geoscientists that come to the table to say, okay, yes, this can be viable if we can control these conditions.
Mary-Anne: And then the other side of it is we’re going to have to explore deposits that we don’t consider really deposits right now. We have, as an industry, started to grab hold of the idea of going back and remining tailings. Right, so waste material that’s been mined, put on surface and or potentially on surface or somewhere else in some other storage and reusing, extracting minerals that maybe 100 years ago when they were mining these deposits they didn’t take everything that was left. And then maybe down the road, maybe we’ll have to actually come up with a viable option on how to economically assess our landfills. Right. For, again, mineral extraction.
Veronica: Yeah. For sure. There’s so many options that we might not have thought of. So you mentioned in our last conversation that you actually did a Master’s project that was talking about the circular economy. So could you just tell us a bit more about that? And what were some of the results from your research?
Mary-Anne: Sure. I mean, we’ve sort of touched on some of the key questions that were in that research. So through the Queens mural program, I was able to conduct a project where I was able to interview people that are in the industry or in the peripheral, about their view on how we as a whole industry could move towards a circular economy. And one of the pieces that, well, actually there’s two pieces that stood out to me in that research.
Mary-Anne: One, for sure, is that we need to collaborate more across many disciplines. So again, this idea of making sure geoscience is at the table. So we needed to integrate our our approaches earlier in what we’re doing, having conversations sooner about how we can best be effective in whatever approach that we’re doing so that we end up with a more sustainable approach overall, that the benefit of having that there is that you have greater opportunity to get. I wouldn’t say get it right, but do the best for society and minimize risk to society.
Mary-Anne: And then the other side of it is thinking about how we reward people in the industry, people and companies in the industry, that our current reward schemes are not necessarily being viewed through that lens of sustainability. You know, we need to ask ourselves and the organizations that do this need to ask themselves, is it okay to reward a company an industry award, for having a really great profitable year? You know, when we haven’t considered their workplace safety record or, you know, anything that might have come up with the human rights tribunal. Because at the end of it, you can have a really great bottom line and making tons of money, but doing a heck of a lot of harm. If the award system is set up in such a way to to award essentially bad behavior then you’re going to continue getting bad behavior. And we have to evaluate that, not just that sort of national level, but also in into how we award our individuals that are performing in our workplaces. We again need to value those that are contributing to positively to geoscience and ensuring that we’re holding true to our code of ethics, where we enter a respectful discourse, support the the development of others, and coach in positive manners, and build that foundation of, of a really principled approach to our practice.
Veronica: Yeah, yeah, I love that. I definitely think that’s really true. I think that’s a great segue into the next questions. Do you feel like the profession of geoscience has changed over the course of your career in regards to things like sustainability and stuff like that?
Mary-Anne: Yeah, absolutely. I can’t say that we haven’t changed. We’re changing every day. I would say in terms of the course of my career there’s definitely a greater emphasis on creating a safe work environment. Not just from a physical safety perspective, but also from a mental health perspective and making sure that the workplace is inclusive and collaborative and really, you know, listening to others and understanding their perspective. And you have can see that, you know, it would have been nothing to send a geologist off to a field camp in isolation with a drill crew for, you know, 6 to 8 weeks. It still happens, but there’s more care and concern about how sustainable is that, you know, for the person, the individual, do they have enough support? Do we have a way to make sure that we’re not causing harm to them? Right. So definitely on that end and then on the environmental geoscience side of things or the environmental piece, I think we’re evolving. It’s not it’s not something that’s done and dusted. We can always do better. And then on top of that, introducing new concepts to us and to our profession around climate adaptation and understanding that we do have impact on our natural environment and better understanding what that is and then putting a plan in place to mitigate those risks that are associated with our work.
Veronica: Yeah, definitely. So you’d say, yeah, things have changed, but there’s always room for improvement.
Mary-Anne: Always. There’s we’re still on our path to achieving those aspirational goals that we have as a profession.
Veronica: Yeah, definitely could talk about what do you see for the future of geoscience in society? How can the profession improve? Where do you see geoscience going? I know that’s a very big question, but yeah.
Mary-Anne: I see geoscience becoming more involved in many conversations that we inherently haven’t been involved in before. We’ve touched on a few of those and then, you know, really far fetched, but maybe not that far fetched. There’s also Planetary Geoscience, which we haven’t really mentioned either. And who knows? Like geoscientists have, I’m sure already in more of an academic sphere, are likely trying to see if there’s any resources or other other ways to look at at the other planets.
Mary-Anne: Actually a funny story. So when I was doing my mineralogy course, Dr Ron Peterson, he was just fascinated by Mars and the question about whether or not there was water on Mars. And he over the course of this term that I was in his course, he managed to identify based on some imagery that had been published, NASA had been publishing it, but they put regular feeds out with it. He had been noticing that there had been some change in some of the crystal patterns that were visible in this picture, and he realized that it was sort of similar to what he had observed at one time. I don’t know if it was part of his career or just for for fun. He had observed it and he was out of some epsomite that was in Death Valley, and he managed to get in contact with the NASA team and then, in conversation with other scientists, was able to actually prove that there probably was water on Mars.
Veronica: That’s so cool.
Mary-Anne: And that was just a fun little side project he was doing in his garage at one point. And following a feed from NASA. Right. So who knows where geoscience goes, right?
Veronica: That’s so awesome. I love that he did that.
Mary-Anne: Yeah. And then the other the other side of it I think where our profession could continue to improve is we were advancing into a point where we’re going to have more technology available to us than we ever have had. And technology available in ways that we’ve never really explored. And as both a professional and and someone who, you know, thinks we, we also need regulation in that profession. I think, you know, we need to come to grips with machine learning and artificial intelligence and ways that we haven’t really yet. And technology has been sort of creeping along in getting more invasive in our work and invasive in a good way. We need the technology. The data sets we’re using are extremely robust. Sometimes far beyond the capability of our own computers. And we really need to have these new techniques, these new software, this new technology, and we need to embrace it and grab a hold of it and understand it and really build it into our discipline in a way that makes it reliable and ethical.
Veronica: Yeah. And I think sometimes there’s a bit of a hesitation, of course, around AI and machine learning and things like that. Which is why we need to, yeah, put effort into making things ethical and making sure that we’re doing it right so that we can use these tools that are being created. So okay, so to end the podcast, I always ask people just a fun question, which is what is your favorite geological feature in Ontario?
Mary-Anne: That’s a really challenging question.
Veronica: Sorry.
Mary-Anne: You know, there are so many fun things. And I think if you ask that question probably publicly, you will end up with something like Niagara Falls or something as an answer. I’m going to give you a more, probably a more closer to home sort of story. So when I was growing up, you know, we talk about this abundance. When I was growing up, my dad would always make sure that there was plenty of food on the table. Right? And he grew up on a farm. And so he always talked about how important soil was, even though he had hadn’t been farming for years, he’d still always pick up the Farmer’s Almanac to see the growing season would look like in the next year. And it gets me to sort of think about the things that we drive by all the time, but we don’t really place a lot of thought or emphasis around, you know, for those folks that live in the Toronto area, I don’t know if it’s an hour, maybe 40 minutes of the city, you have a corridor that you go through on the 400, and it’s the Holland Marsh. And the Holland Marsh is a geological feature in Ontario. And it’s it’s often, I think, called is it the vegetable basket or something like that. And, you know, it produces an abundance of vegetables. And if you open your windows you’re going to usually at certain times of the year, you can smell the onions that are growing.
Mary-Anne: Right. And those vegetables aren’t just produced, I think, for Ontario, but outside of the province as well. And how many Canadians rely on the Holland Marsh without even realizing it as part of their nutritious diet? And, you know, we have this because 12,000 years ago, some giant glacier came traipsing across that area of Ontario, you know, and then on its retreat, you ended up with this depression, which is the marsh. And it formed, I think it was glacial Lake Algonquin and then now Simcoe drains into it and it creates this beautiful soil. It creates this environment to create this beautiful soil. You have to think about the fact that going back to appreciating where your things come from, that these beautiful carrots and onions and other produce that come from that region. I think it’s something on the order of a 500 years to create a foot of that soil. And then we think about urban development and we want to expand into these, these green beltways something I never thought about really until very recently, probably in the last two years, as I’ve seen different cities expanding, forests that are getting cut down and arable land being taken over by massive amounts of housing. But how are we managing as a society, these really incredibly rich resources that we haven’t even considered? So Holland Marsh, go look it up.
Veronica: I actually love that so much. I didn’t know that that’s what you were going to answer, but I grew up on the Holland Marsh. Like, I grew up in a farm, on a farm in the middle of the fields and used to, like, pick carrots from the ground and eat them. So I love that that’s your answer, because it is such a beautiful place with such, like, thick black soil. And yeah, it’s right outside of Toronto. People don’t necessarily know it exists. So yeah, I love that.
Mary-Anne: Yeah. It’s a it’s a great place. I mean they call it the soil as black gold. And if you think about, you know, how we value gold. And this is essentially just the same thing. It’s what keeps the society going. Right. We have to, again, protect that future for the next generations.
Veronica: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. That’s so important. And yeah, something that geoscientists, I think can help do. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming and chatting with me, Mary-Anne. It’s been so great to talk to you.
Mary-Anne: It’s been great. Thanks for having me. It’s been wonderful.
Veronica: Of course.
Outro
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Beneath Your Feet, a geoscience podcast. I’m Veronica Klassen, science communicator and geology enthusiast. As a reminder, please note that the opinions and views expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the APGO Education Foundation. If you want to learn more, visit us at GeoscienceINFO.com, where you can find our GeoHikes, podcast transcripts, and additional resources. You can also follow us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at GeoscienceINFO or on LinkedIn and Facebook at the APGO Education Foundation. Stay curious and keep exploring the incredible world Beneath Your Feet.
Mary-Anne Hildebrandt, BSc, BAH, MEERL, P.Geo., FGC:
Mary-Anne has worked in the mining and exploration industry for 18 years, with experience in all aspects of economic geology. She was nominated for the Women in Mining Canada 2020 Trailblazer Award and the De Beers safety leadership award (twice). She was designated a Fellow of Geoscience Canada (FGC) in 2022. She has had the unique experience of working as a geoscientist on an operation from “cradle to grave” and progressed her career during that time to a Competent Person (CP). Mary-Anne holds a BSc in Geological and Earth Sciences, a BA in Political Studies, and a Master of Earth and Energy Resource Leadership degree. In 2022, she was elected as Vice President of the Professional Geoscientists Ontario (PGO) Council and assumed the role of President in June 2023 for a one-year term. Mary-Anne is presently the Immediate Past President on PGO’s Council. Dedicated to developing and defining geoscience best practice, Mary-Anne is a leader, mentor and champion of innovative solutions in the workplace.