Marc St-Onge

Research and projects

Précis:

I am Senior Emeritus Scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), part of Natural Resources Canada, with expertise in regional geology and tectonics, bedrock mapping, metamorphic petrology, the Canadian Arctic, NW Scotland, and the Himalaya. During the course of my geological career, I have led multiple mapping projects and supervised undergraduate and graduate students in many remote parts of the world, from the Coppermine River area in the western Canadian Arctic (where my colleagues and I discovered the oldest rocks in the world – Acasta Gneiss) to Banks Island, the Keewatin, northern Quebec, southern, southwestern, southeastern, central and northern Baffin Island in the eastern Canadian Arctic, western Greenland, Scotland, Greece, the Himalaya of Pakistan, India and Nepal and the Tibetan Plateau in China. I was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford in 2004, Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in 2010, Vice President (North America) of the Commission for the Geological Map of the World in 2012, Senior Scholar at Cambridge University in 2019, and Visiting Professor at Oxford in 2019. My work led to the publication of the “Geological Map of the Arctic” in 2011, the “Tectonic Map of Arctic Canada” in 2015, the GSC’s first-ever geological maps in Inuktitut, also in 2015, the “Tectonic Map of the Arctic” in 2019, and a synthesis of the bedrock geology of Baffin Island in 2020. Presently I am co-lead on the Canada-3D project, which among other objectives aims to produce a new, updated, digital, 3-D “Geological Map of Canada”.　

Research Projects:

• Geology of Baffin Island
• Geological and tectonic evolution of the Arctic
• Geology of Tibet, Nepal and India
• Petrology of eclogites, Buchan- and Barrovian-type pelitic sequences, and pelitic migmatites
• Geological Map of Canada (Canada-3D)

Professional activities and affiliations:

• Fellow,　Geological Association of Canada
• Fellow,　Geological Society of America
• Fellow,　Royal Canadian Geographical Society
• Earth Sciences Resource Person, Adventure Canada
• Arctic and Antarctic Geoscience (AAG) theme champion, 35th International Geological Congress, Cape Town, South Africa
• Project Leader, Geomapping for Energy and Minerals (GEM) Program, Baffin Island region, Nunavut
• Project Leader, Open Geoscience Program, Canada-3D

Principal Colleagues:

• Mike Searle (University of Oxford)
• Owen Weller (University of Cambridge)
• Diane Skipton (Yukon Geological Survey)
• Richard Palin (University of Oxford)
• Brendan Dyck (Simon Fraser University)
• Randall Orndorff and Tom Moore (USGS)
• Manuel Pubellier and Camille Francois (CGMW)
• Christopher Harrison, Boyan Brodaric, Nicole Rayner, Dianne Paul (GSC)
• Ian Cawood (University of Oxford)