OBITUARY: Yves Fortier: A herald of Canada’s golden age of geology – by Eric Harris (Globe and Mail – September 17, 2014)

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When the astronauts walked on the moon in July, 1969, their main mission was to collect rocks and dust from the Sea of Tranquility. They were test pilots first and narrowly trained field geologists second.

When Yves Oscar Fortier explored Canada’s remote northern reaches in the 1940s and 1950s, he was also breaking new ground in a hostile environment. But he was a geologist through and through.

Dr. Fortier, who died peacefully in Ottawa on Aug. 19, two days after his 100th birthday, conducted milestone work in the Arctic for the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) that was, in many ways, like a months-long moon mission.

His most ambitious project, Operation Franklin, in 1955, mustered 28 scientists to systematically study and map the cold, barren sedimentary rock of a polar region larger than Britain.

This included the Queen Elizabeth Islands and many of the other islands in the triangle at the northern end of the country. (The name Operation Franklin was a nod to the ill-fated 1845 expedition led by Sir John Franklin to search for a Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic. One of the long-lost ships from that expedition was recently discovered.)

Dr. Fortier and his team used long-range Sikorsky S-55 helicopters to deposit 600-kilogram payloads of food and fuel at intervals across the tundra. He then launched research groups from bases on Melville, Bathurst and southern Ellesmere islands. Mission control was in Resolute on Cornwallis Island and Eureka on Ellesmere. Bad weather scrubbed more than half the planned flights but, despite this, ground-truthing geological investigations were completed across 260,000 square kilometres.

“It was the most ambitious Arctic expedition in Canada,” says Denis St-Onge, a geologist and emeritus scientist at the GSC. “They determined the great geological zones of that region.”

The resulting rock samples, maps and reports were an extraordinary revelation, describing thick layers of sedimentary rock and structures similar to those found in oil fields. They became a standard reference for oil and gas exploration in the Arctic islands, and brought Dr. Fortier and his assistants, Raymond Thorsteinsson and Timothy Tozer, international renown.

“[Dr.] Fortier’s work in the Arctic changed our understanding of the geology and the economic potential of various parts of the region,” Dr. St-Onge says. “And not just oil and gas. There are many other minerals there.”

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