Past Groundwater Foundation Darcy Lecturer Barbara Sherwood-Lollar, Ph.D., received the prestigious Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering for her work on ancient Earth water and for advancing the search for life on other worlds.
The award is handed out each year by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)of Canada.
Sherwood-Lollar, an Earth sciences professor at the University of Toronto, has been studying ancient water below the Earth’s surface in mines on the Canadian Shield and around the world. Determining the chemistry of that water could be used to study moons like Europa, a moon around Jupiter, and Enceladus, a moon around Saturn.
In 2016, Sherwood-Lollar and her team of scientists found what was believed to be the oldest water on Earth, estimated to be two billion years old. The discovery earned her NSERC’s John C. Polanyi Award.
Sherwood-Lollar was the 1998 Darcy Lecturer who presented on “Stable Carbon Isotopes: Tools for Direction of the Origin and Fate of the Environmental Contaminants.”
Click here to read more about Sherwood-Lollar receiving the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering.