The following list is sorted roughly by the number of faculty members participating in each group.

PCIGR - Pacific Centre for Isotopic and Geochemical Research

An integrated analytical facility to provide the full range of state-of-the-art instrumentation for isotopic and geochemical Earth Science researchers in western Canada

MDRU - Mineral Deposit Research Unit

A collaborative venture between the mining industry and the University of British Columbia, focussed on mineral exploration related problems.

GeoDisaster Centre - Geophysical Disaster Computational Fluid Dynamics Centre

Research to better understand weather predictability and disaster physics, and applied research to make daily forecasts of weather and disasters.

Marine Ecology and Biogeochemistry

The processes which take place throughout the ocean's huge volume have large impacts on global climate and life everywhere. Most of these processes are poorly quantified in today's world, and long-term variations are largely unknown. Research here brings together biologists, chemists, geologists and physical oceanographers and provides a fertile ground for our expanding appreciation of the earth system.

Physical Oceanography & Dynamic Meteorology

Physical oceanographers at UBC are involved in projects ranging from local to global, from the workings of a local harbour to climate change in the tropical Pacific to the oceanography of the Arctic. Some of these problems are "pure physics", and others are tied into larger efforts in understanding biological, climatic, and other problems.

STRATOGEM - Strait of Georgia Research

STRATOGEM is an attempt to understand the links between the lowest levels of biological productivity in the Strait of Georgia with the physical dynamics of the system. By tying together a 3 year monitoring program with computer models of the circulation and biological dynamics we hope to come up with some idea as to why some of these changes are occurring.

Volcanology

Home page of the Volcanology and Petrology Laboratory.

Hydrogeology

Home page of the UBC Hydrogeology program.

Teleseismic and Active Source Seismology

The Seismology group develops and applies seismic techniques to image the structure and constrain the physical properties of the crust and upper mantle. Teleseismic and controlled source techniques are used in diverse research topics spanning a large range of scales. Lithospheric-scale studies include investigations of subduction processes and the tectonic evolution of North America. Upper crustal research includes developing exploration techniques for kimberlite dykes and investigating the exploration potential and environmental risks for offshore BC oil and gas.

LITHOPROBE

Lithoprobe is Canada's major national research project in the earth sciences. It combines multidisciplinary earth science studies of the Canadian landmass and surrounding offshore margins to determine how the northern North American continent has formed over geological time from 4000 million years ago to the present. UBC/EOS hosts the Lithoprobe director (Dr. Clowes) and secretariat.

BATHOLITHS

BATHOLITHS is a new Earth science research project to better understand the geological formation of the Coast Mountains of British Columbia. BATHOLITHS is very much a multidisciplinary research project. It involves geological mapping and related laboratory studies, geochemical studies and age dating of the rocks, and a seismic program to image the structure and composition of the lithosphere (the upper 100 km of Earth), of which the Coast Mountains are a part.

Mineral Carbonation

The focus of the mineral carbonation project at UBC is primarily to document the formation of naturally occurring ultramafic rock related analogs to CO2 sequestration by mineral carbonation. These include carbonate-altered serpentinite (listwanite); the formation of hydromagnesite swamps in ultramafic terranes; and hydromagnesite crusts on serpentine rich mine waste rock such as crystal (white asbestos) mines and kimberlite diamond mines. These and future studies will be undertaken to reveal reaction paths, mechanics and catalysts to drive in situ and industrially accelerated mineral carbonation.

Landslide Hazards Research

The long-term objective of the engineering geology research group at UBC is to provide methods for reliable, quantitative assessment of landslide hazards and for the derivation of parameters needed for design and rational decision-making.

Geotechnical Rock Engineering Research Group

Landslides and Rockslope Instabilities, Tunnelling and Underground Excavations, Stress-Induced Brittle Microfracturing and Underground Mining and Pillar Stability, these are some of the topics this group researchs.

Diamond Exploration Laboratory

The Diamond Exploration Lab carries out petrological and mineralogical studies of kimberlite, mantle xenoliths and diamonds, i.e. all types of materials available as a result of diamond exploration. The research focuses on the Slave, Superior and Amazonian craton and aims to uncover the structure, thermal regime and bulk composition of their diamondiferous upper mantle. The Lab also studies volcanology of Canadian kimberlites and other diamondiferous rocks.

UBC-GIF - Geophysical Inversion Facility

The UBC-Geophysical Inversion Facility's (UBC-GIF) focus is the development and application of geophysical forward modelling and inversion methodologies. Mineral exploration and UXO characterization are primary contexts, while environmental, geotechnical and large scale Earth imaging problems are also of interest.

MOC2 - Modelling Clouds and Climate

MOC2 is a collaborative research network focussed on improving the representation of clouds in Canadian global and regional climate models.

Climate Prediction Group

This group is devoted to the study of short-term climate variability and prediction, and to the development of neural networks and other machine learning methods for nonlinear multivariate and time series analysis.

Weather Forecast

The WFRT, supervised by Dr. Roland Stull, is a team of researchers at the undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate, and postdoctoral levels. We use numerical weather prediction (NWP) models for ongoing research purposes, as well as to produce daily real-time forecast products.

Glaciology

Our long-term field study of Trapridge Glacier, Yukon. This glacier is surge-type and we have been observing the onset and decline of its most recent advance. We are particularly interested in examining the subglacial processes that control the flow of this glacier. We are interest in cryospheric modelling from a number of perspectives. Numerous abrupt climate change events occurred during the last Ice Age. We are interested in examining potential cryospheric triggers for abrupt climate change.

SLIM - Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modeling

We are interested in theoretical aspects of exploration and global reflection seismology. Research is directed towards creating a fundamental understanding of seismic imaging and inversion, as well as establishing a direct link between local aspects of seismic reflectivity and major events in the geological processes that are responsible for rapid changes in the Earth's elastic properties.

Marine Virology and Microbiology

Heightened awareness of global environmental changes has emphasized the need to understand more fully nutrient and energy cycling in the World's oceans. There is strong evidence that viruses play an important role in the dynamics of organisms and nutrients in marine ecosystems. Current research in my laboratory involves: 1) determining the effect that viruses have on the mortality of bacteria and phytoplankton; 2) isolating and characterizing novel viral pathogens from the marine environment; 3) developing molecular approaches for enumeration and identification of viral pathogens; 4) determining the temporal and spatial distribution of specific viruses; 5) identifying the rates of and the mechanisms responsible for viral decay in the marine environment. A recent project has examined the physiological ecology and molecular systematics of a bloom-forming alga.

Organic Petrology & Sedimentology

Study of the sedimentology and diagenesis of organic matter in sediments with particular reference to petroleum source rocks, coal and formation of ore deposits. Research reas include: peat sedimentology, coalbed methane, organic maturation, coal sedimentology, characterization of macerals, effects of pressure on pyrolyses products of organic matter and reservoir characteristics of coal and the origin of graphite.

Ocean Dynamics Laboratory

Research projects include coastal mixing processes (bulk flow, mixing, and mass Fluxes) as well as internal tides and mixing. Flow visualization using time-lapse photography and studies of the dynamics of Harrison Lake, the STRATOGEM (Strait of Georgia Project) and Arctic Hydrography.

CICMMH - Cooperative Institute for Coastal and Mountain Meteorology and Hydrology

To foster the advancement of weather prediction, hydrometeorology, and meteorological knowledge via collaboration between UBC and Environment Canada.

CDSST - Consortium for the Developement of Specialized Seismic Techniques

The theme of our consortium is the development of concepts and algorithms for the purpose of processing and interpretation of time and space aperture limited data. Our philosophy is based on information theoretic principles and entails the use of probability, time series modeling, Bayesian principles, bootstrap statistics and the wavelet transform. Our philosophy is one that combines these principles in a general inverse scheme. We stress, in particular, the importance of prior information as a method of regularizing of what always turns out to be an underdetermined or, in general, an ill-posed inverse problem.

Arctic Physical Oceanography

The Canadian shelf waters of the Arctic Ocean cover a large surface area, including the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Hudson Bay. This region draws its characteristics and associated properties (e.g. T, S, nutrients, organic carbon, plankton, sediments) from the Arctic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and numerous rivers. The area is subject to extreme annual and interannual variations in both its ice cover and river inflow. The oceanography of the shelf can be divided into four different periods related to the interaction between the two dominant cycles of runoff and air temperature.

Applied Mineral Inventory

The research of this group focuses on resource/reserve estimation, particularly, integration of geology into the procedures, the practical uses of data evaluation techniques and the development of both philosophy and methodology in quality control. This work has involved graduate students, research assistants and members of industry and has led to a number of refereed publications listed elsewhere.

Biometeorology and Soil Physics Group

The Biometeorology and Soil Physics Group of UBC (BIOMET) is aimed at studying the effects of climate and disturbance on carbon sequestration in Canadian forested ecosystems. The main focus of our group is to better understand the biophysical processes controlling carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapor (H2O) and energy exchange between west-coast temperate and southern boreal forests and the atmosphere. As part of this goal, we are currently making year-round measurements of CO2, H2O and energy fluxes at more than seven forested sites.