Jack Souther
In his teenage years, Souther relocated with his family to the Canadian province of Alberta at a cattle ranch near the First Nations settlement of Morley.
[2] After completing his degree, Souther joined the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) office in Vancouver and carved out a remarkable career as one of the country's leading authorities on geothermal resources and volcanism in the Canadian Cordillera.
[2] Jack Souther died on June 1, 2014, in Lions Gate Hospital, North Vancouver at the age of 90 following a long battle with cancer.
[1] Souther's scientific work embraced a broad spectrum of topics, including volcanology, stratigraphy, hydrogeology, landslides, tectonics and mineral deposits.
This began to change in 1956 when the crash mapping program of Operation Stikine identified a number of Cenozoic volcanoes in northwestern British Columbia.
The Strand Fiord Formation on west-central Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut consists mainly of basaltic lava flows and agglomerates.
[8] It comprises dark grey shale and siltstone with subordinate sandstone and some local thin bentonitic and tuffaceous beds.
By 1970, the two geologists had established that eruptions of alkali basalt, followed by extrusion of silicic peralkaline lavas, had occurred episodically at Edziza for the past 10 million years and that volcanism was accompanied by east-west extension and incipient rifting.
[5][11] During this year he highlighted the importance and size of the region and proposed that numerous eruptions emplaced lava in a sub-ice or ice-contact environment.
[12] As part of Operation St. Elias, Jack Souther studied the stratigraphy, structure and evolution of the Wrangell lavas of southwest Yukon in the mid 1970s.
The differences in eruptive style and chemistry of the Wrangell lavas led Souther to speculate they were related to a calc-alkaline volcanic arc that formed along a converging plate boundary.
[5] In 1977, a book published under the title Volcanic Regimes in Canada included a chapter on Cordilleran tectonics by Jack Souther.
Souther classified these rocks as part of the Gambier Group, a geologic formation that was created within a shallow underwater basin about 100 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous period.
This ancient hydrothermal system, combined with sulfurous gasses released from the magma, caused chemical alteration of both the crystallizing subvolcanic intrusion and the adjacent rocks.
