The Pandemic Strikes Again: Postponement of Geology Conference and its History Session

First posted Friday, January 22, 2021 /  Yom shishi, 9 Shevat, 5781

By David Orenstein

I was notified last week that the Session on “The History of Geosciences in Canada”, part of the GAC-MAC 2021 conference, has been postponed along with the entire conference. The new dates are November 1-3, 2021, with the abstract submission deadline now July 12, 2021.

This is due to a variety of reasons coming out of the pandemic.

If you would still like a taste of the history of Geology in Canada, I refer you to the following link:

<https://ia801707.us.archive.org/22/items/josephburrtyrrel00tyrr/josephburrtyrrel00tyrr.pdf>

It’s Joseph Burr Tyrrell’s Scrapbook from the 1913 International Geological Congress (IGC) hosted by the University of Toronto . It was posted to the Internet Archive by the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library in preparation for our GAC-MAC History Session.

It’s a massive volume largely filled with clippings about the 1913 IGC from such Canadian newspapers as the Toronto Globe, the Cobalt DailyNugget, and the Victoria Daily Colonist.  Also from journals like Saturday Night and The Canadian Mining Journal. Towards the end of the scrapbook you can find copies of IGC ephemeral publications like the programmes and delegate lists of the congress itself and some of its associated field trips.

Tyrrell led a long and fascinating life as a field geologist, a mining entrepreneur, a patron of science and an amateur historian of Canadian Science.

But that’s another story.