Barbara Sherwood Lollar has spent more than 30 years studying deep, underground water and its surprisingly vast potential - from offering clues about potential life on other planets to locating valuable energy sources.
A geochemist at the University of Toronto, she has found new tools to monitor the clean-up of contaminated groundwater, developed a better understanding of deep, subsurface gases and discovered what may be the world's most ancient water - a find that drew the attention of NASA.
Most recently, she's become a sought-after expert in the global search for clean-burning underground hydrogen, which occurs naturally when salty underground water mingles with certain types of rock.
The resource could play a key role in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
"These things are intertwined," says Sherwood Lollar, University Professor in the department of Earth sciences in the Faculty of Arts & Science. "You bring a certain novel approach to things, and it can allow you to crack open a variety of problems."
The Dr. Norman Keevil Chair in Ore Deposits Geology, Sherwood Lollar co-authored a study in Nature and a 72-page policy briefing for the Royal Society in the United Kingdom earlier this year that both explore the potential of harnessing naturally occurring hydrogen as part of a broader decarbonization strategy.
A US$135-billion global industry, hydrogen is currently used to produce ammonia (used in fertilizer) and methanol (an industrial solvent and marine fuel) and to refine metals. The highly combustible gas, which burns without creating carbon dioxide, also holds huge potential in the global transportation industry, where it can power everything from cargo ships to trains - and even passenger jets. It's therefore considered an important part of the global green energy transition.
Most of the hydrogen currently used for energy is made from coal or natural gas - processes that generate 2.4 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. So, finding it underground and extracting it - ideally with existing mining infrastructure and alongside other valuable materials - would be a much cheaper and more climate-friendly solution, Sherwood Lollar says.
"If there are places where Mother Nature has produced hydrogen for us, this could be a contribution not only to decreasing costs, but decarbonization."
Sherwood Lollar's recent work for the Royal Society focuses on the opportunities and limitations of hydrogen extraction and use in the U.K., but she hopes Canadian policy-makers are paying attention, too.
"The nature of the rocks we have in Canada are amongst those that produce hydrogen," she says.
Her current work builds on earlier studies exploring how ancient water interacts with rock to produce the gas deep underground, which feeds and sustains microbes. The work led to her discovery of 1.6-billion-year-old water in a mine north of Timmins, Ont., drawing global headlines .
"Sometimes the billion-year-old water gets talked about as if I stumbled over it while staggering around in the dark somewhere," Sherwood Lollar says.
The scientific community, on the other hand, immediately understood the find's wider significance.
It led to a partnership with NASA to assess the potential for extraterrestrial life below the surface of other planets. More recently, Sherwood Lollar has been called upon to help develop safety protocols for bringing space samples back to Earth.
All of this happened against the backdrop of Sherwood Lollar's ongoing work with contaminated groundwater. She developed a process for assessing the breakdown of dangerous substances in water using naturally occurring isotopes of carbon. It's a widely used approach, so much so that she wrote a guidance document to describe it for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency .
For her accomplishments, Sherwood Lollar has won numerous prestigious awards, including the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering and the Killam Prize for Natural Sciences . She's also been named a Companion of the Order of Canada . Earlier this year, she received the Geological Society of London's Wollaston Medal .
Sherwood Lollar traces her early interest in water, geology and underground life to the 1977 discovery of life in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean - far from sunlight and sustained by chemicals rather than photosynthesis. "It changed our thinking of life on the planet."
Fed a "steady diet of Jules Verne" by her parents - both history professors at Queen's University - Sherwood Lollar went on to study at Harvard University, where she recalls titling one of her first-year papers "Captain Nemo Was Right."
She completed her PhD at the University of Waterloo and joined U of T in 1992. Since then, she has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers.
Geography continues to fascinate her because of its huge scope.
"Earth science and geology are fundamentally interdisciplinary. It's the study of life, it's the study of the Earth, it's the study of resources, it's the study of water, it's the study of climate," she says.
"When I was a little kid, I thought science and geology would be fun. I didn't realize it was going to be this much fun. And the beauty of it is, the questions matter. You feel like you're giving something back in a time when the world is so chaotic."
