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IQALUIT
Geologists will spend the next few summers learning about a place that is "white space" on Nunavut's geological map, Canada-Nunavut Geoscience Office chief geologist David Mate told those gathered at a presentation March 21.

David Veevee, left, shows Canada-Nunavut Geoscience Office chief geologist David Mate, centre, his personal history on the Hall Peninsula map, including the area where his last name originates. Mate's team will study Hall Peninsula's geology starting this summer. - Casey Lessard/NNSL photo

"We don't know a lot about the geology out there," Mate said of Hall Peninsula, the area east of Iqaluit. "If you look where we're going, there are almost no points (of previous investigation on the map). The only points that are on here are from the 1960s, and it was a fellow flying in a helicopter who landed, and the spaces in between were quite large."

The dearth of knowledge is rare, but significant, he told those gathered at the Nunavut Research Institute.

"There's so much unknown in this area," he said. "There are not many places in Canada where you have this little coverage of the land. For us, it's really exciting. We can see lots of new things and develop maps for the first time."

Mate hopes the study will help determine Hall Peninsula's geological history.

"There are rocks on Baffin Island that correlate to Greenland," he said. "There's some thought that Meta Incognita was its own continent at one time. There's bits of rock coming up from Labrador, and there's a big area of rock in the Atlantic. But no one knows where Hall Peninsula comes from."

Mate is confident his team will make new discoveries in this uncharted territory. One area, for example, shows remnants of cold-base glaciers, which were not very erosive to the ground beneath them when they slid.

"What you get is a really old, old, weathered surface," he said. "We have this bedrock that was just weathered for years and years. Some of the permafrost guys are excited because it's kind of a new material type we've never looked at before."

He also expects the research will be useful for people other than geologists.

For example, tracking the movement of glaciers can help those in the mining industry gain knowledge about mineral deposits.

"Glaciers scrape the landscape, so you can tell how erosive the glacier was, and in which direction it went," he said. "Those are things that a prospector wants to know to figure out where a mineral came from if a glacier transported and eroded it. If you know where a glacier went, you can figure out where things came from."

The research will involve a maximum of 25 researchers working for several summers.

A helicopter will drop the researchers off at their study locations in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon to return to a base camp east-southeast of Iqaluit.

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