GAC®
National Medals & Awards
Logan Medal
Logan Medallist -
Dr. Christopher Barnes
CitationChris Barnes is one of the great developers and builders of Canadian and global earth sciences. He has contributed enormously to the development of universities, scientific societies, agencies and programs in Canada. His managerial skills are legendary and his persuasive and logical arguments in any debate are appropriately famous. These skills were used early in his career when as Secretary-Treasurer he steered the Geological Association of Canada to a new level of sophistication; his long and distinguished service has been a keystone to the success of our Association. His skills have benefited many other national and international scientific councils, societies and programs as well as government agencies and universities. At Waterloo, Memorial and Victoria, he developed and led three innovative university earth science departments, always breaking existing moulds and forming exciting new interdisciplinary groups.
Chris is a world scientific leader in the fields of paleontology and stratigraphy. His work has elucidated the biostratigraphy, paleoecology, ultrastructure and thermal alteration of conodont microfossils and he has incorporated these data with chemical and physical data and applied them to global stratigraphy, paleoclimates, ocean circulation and paleogeography in a myriad of publications. He has contributed more to the understanding of the Lower Paleozoic history of our planet that any other Canadian.
His excellence has been recognized by many honours. From our Association he has received the Past Presidents Medal, the Ambrose Medal and the Billings Medal. In 1982 he was elected to The Royal Society of Canada and received its Bancroft Award. Chris Barnes was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1996 and was awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 2002. In 2007 he received a Doctorate of Science (honoris causa) from the University of Waterloo.
Since 2002 Chris Barnes has been the energetic leader of the Neptune Canada Project. This exciting complex multidisciplinary project is the largest earth science project currently undertaken in Canada. A comprehensive undersea cabled network of linked sub-sea observatories is being established to continuously survey the subsurface, the sea floor and the waters above. Cited by the Economist Magazine as one of the five most significant current scientific projects in the world, it promises to unleash a flood of new scientific data from the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate and from the ocean above.
For all of his extraordinary accomplishments and his stellar scientific career, Chris Barnes is most deserving of the Logan Medal, the highest award of the Geological Association of Canada.