Sasha Wilson and her team haul water up a mineral waste pile outside Brisbane, Australia for on-site testing. Credit: Jessica Hamilton
"Anything can become a contaminant when a system is out of balance," said Sasha Wilson of the elements she studies. "It's all about context."
The balance Wilson will investigate in her new role as an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences is that between the economic and environmental aspects of geology. Wilson's research focuses on two main streams: carbon sequestration and metal recovery.
"I'm interested in improving environmental sustainability for the minerals industry, specifically using metal mobility for metal recovery and carbon sequestration," she explained. "If there's an economic incentive to do something environmentally beneficial, it's more likely that these techniques will be adopted. The first step is finding out what those techniques might be."
Focused on remediation
Wilson's work focuses on the macro scale, studying landscape-scale geochemical processes in both natural and engineered environments, as well as remediating contamination in industrial environments . This includes remediation of mineral waste piles from mining sites. "Initially, there isn't much living on mineral waste piles," said Wilson. "If we know more about how the living landscape encroaches on bare, uncolonized rock, we can learn more about how to speed up the remediation process."
Another technique is improving the efficiency of mineral processing with a specific focus on metal recovery from mineral wastes. "Mineral processing isn't 100 per cent efficient," explained Wilson. "In some situations, you might get 30 or 40 per cent of the mineral resource going into the waste." And there's a real risk for that remaining 30 to 40 pre cent to contaminate the surrounding landscape.
Her work has taken her to industrial and natural environments around the world, from a postdoctoral fellowship at the NASA Astrobiology Institute, to a faculty position at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia to her new home at the University of Alberta. Here, Wilson plans to extend her research to Alberta's saline lakes, recovering resources from waste waters associated with the petroleum industry, and exploring the variety of sedimentary mineral deposits the province has to offer. She also looks forward to bringing aspiring geologists into the field and to teaching mineralogy.