Brian Pratt, University of Saskatchewan
Geological Sciences
Professor
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
brian.pratt@usask.ca
Office:
(306) 966-5725
Expert In
Bio/Research
I was born in Hamilton and grew up in nearby Dundas, a town nestled against the Niagara Escarpment of southern Ontario. I became a faculty member in the Department of Geological Sciences in 1989, after studying at McMaster, McGill, Memorial and Toronto, along with spending several years in the oi...
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Bio/Research
I was born in Hamilton and grew up in nearby Dundas, a town nestled against the Niagara Escarpment of southern Ontario. I became a faculty member in the Department of Geological Sciences in 1989, after studying at McMaster, McGill, Memorial and Toronto, along with spending several years in the oil industry in Calgary, Alberta.
My scientific activities fall broadly within stratigraphy, with one foot planted in paleontology and the other in sedimentology. With the former, my taxonomic expertise is mainly in Cambrian trilobites, but I also study other fossil groups of Ediacaran through Cambro-Ordovician age, as well as Burgess Shale type faunas, microbial microfossils, stromatolites, reefs, bioerosion, ichnofossils and so on. These all lead me to appreciate the the larger context of paleoecology, paleobiology, taphonomy and biostratigraphy. My sedimentological interests overlap and include depositional environments and diagenesis of shallow-marine limestones and mixed carbonate–siliciclastic facies of all ages, and how these aspects varied through geological time. Lately I have been trying to understand the dynamics of ancient epeiric seas, that is, deciphering the limestones, dolomites and evaporites found in continental interiors which often differ from facies deposited on continental margins. I also dabble a little with ground-penetrating radar as part of my work on Silurian grainstone shoals which are analogues for some petroleum reservoirs. In recent years I have become particularly interested in detecting evidence for ancient earthquakes and tsunamis recorded by distinctive sedimentary structures and anomalous beds in both carbonate and siliciclastic successions. These deformation features, called seismites, open a window on the nature and rheology of sediments before lithification. Seismites and tsunamites tell us about tectonic architecture and behaviour of sedimentary basins.
I conduct my research activities mostly in the mountains of western and northwestern Canada, but I also work on rocks in the high Arctic, Saskatchewan subsurface, southern Ontario, U.S.A., western Argentina, China and so on. Although some of it can be related to petroleum geology, it is fundamentally curiosity-driven. My approach aims to be multi-disciplinary and combines discovery, description, testing and integration to tell a story—answering what I call the interrogative trinity: what? how? and why?
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My scientific activities fall broadly within stratigraphy, with one foot planted in paleontology and the other in sedimentology. With the former, my taxonomic expertise is mainly in Cambrian trilobites, but I also study other fossil groups of Ediacaran through Cambro-Ordovician age, as well as Burgess Shale type faunas, microbial microfossils, stromatolites, reefs, bioerosion, ichnofossils and so on. These all lead me to appreciate the the larger context of paleoecology, paleobiology, taphonomy and biostratigraphy. My sedimentological interests overlap and include depositional environments and diagenesis of shallow-marine limestones and mixed carbonate–siliciclastic facies of all ages, and how these aspects varied through geological time. Lately I have been trying to understand the dynamics of ancient epeiric seas, that is, deciphering the limestones, dolomites and evaporites found in continental interiors which often differ from facies deposited on continental margins. I also dabble a little with ground-penetrating radar as part of my work on Silurian grainstone shoals which are analogues for some petroleum reservoirs. In recent years I have become particularly interested in detecting evidence for ancient earthquakes and tsunamis recorded by distinctive sedimentary structures and anomalous beds in both carbonate and siliciclastic successions. These deformation features, called seismites, open a window on the nature and rheology of sediments before lithification. Seismites and tsunamites tell us about tectonic architecture and behaviour of sedimentary basins.
I conduct my research activities mostly in the mountains of western and northwestern Canada, but I also work on rocks in the high Arctic, Saskatchewan subsurface, southern Ontario, U.S.A., western Argentina, China and so on. Although some of it can be related to petroleum geology, it is fundamentally curiosity-driven. My approach aims to be multi-disciplinary and combines discovery, description, testing and integration to tell a story—answering what I call the interrogative trinity: what? how? and why?
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