The Thomas Condon Lecture honors the legacy of its namesake, a minister, a university teacher and Oregon’s first State Geologist. Thomas Condon used the free public lecture to disseminate scientific knowledge to the general public throughout his career. To honor that legacy, the Oregon Board of Higher Education established the Thomas Condon Lecture in 1944. The generous support of CEOAS and the Research Office allows OSU to bring world-class scientists to campus each year.
2024 Thomas Condon Lecture
Friday, October 25, 6 p.m. (reception begins at 5 p.m.)
LaSells Stewart Center, Construction & Engineering Hall
Title: Minerals for green energy: how geology dictates the social and environmental impacts of mining
Speaker: Elizabeth Holley, exploration and mining geologist and Associate Professor in the Mining Engineering department at Colorado School of Mines
Talk summary: As global communities work to transition to green energy to address urgent climate concerns, it is clear that these energy sources and the batteries to store it still require natural resources, such as cobalt, lithium and nickel. The demand for these critical minerals is predicted to increase dramatically to meet the net-zero by 2050 emissions targets. The geological environments in which these deposits form, dictate how they are mined and the environmental and social impacts of that mining. Elizabeth Holley will use case studies from her research on lithium and nickel-cobalt to illustrate interconnections among geoscience, engineering, environment, people and policy.
Elizabeth Holley is a mineral geologist who studies geological aspects of mineral exploration and mine development, as well as the social and environmental impacts of mining. She is a Fellow of the Payne Institute for Public Policy and was the 2022 Distinguished Lecturer for the Society of Economic Geologists. Holley has worked in the mining sector on five continents and contributed to the discovery of the White Gold deposit in the Yukon. She leads the Responsible Critical Minerals Initiative funded by the National Science Foundation’s Growing Convergence Research program and serves as a site director for the NSF-funded Center to Advance the Science of Exploration to Reclamation in Mining at the Colorado School of Mines.
This year’s Condon and Moore lectures are in conjunction with the Critical Minerals Symposium. See details and registration for the full symposium.
2024 George Moore Seminar
Friday, October 25, from 1 to 2 p.m.
CH2M HILL Alumni Center (Willamette Room) or on Zoom
Title: The Geology of Lithium Resources and Best Practices in Lithium Exploration
Speaker: Tom Benson, Vice President of Global Exploration at Lithium Argentina Corp.
Past Condon Lectures
- 2023 - Thure Cerling - Ivory, INTERPOL, intrigue: Using chemistry to solve forensic mysteries
- 2022 - Kathy Cashman - What's under a volcano, and how do we know?
- 2021 - Jim O'Connor - The Missoula Floods and the Channeled Scablands
- 2020 - Julia Clarke - The secret lives of dinosaurs
- 2018 - Kenneth Ridgway - Earth science & communities: Great earthquakes to wild rice
- 2016 - John Grotzinger - Curiosity's mission of exploration at Gale Crater, Mars
- 2015 - Ellen Morris Bishop - Oregon's climates through time – stories in the stones
- 2014 - Tullis C. Onstott - Carbon cycling in the deep subsurface: Never was so much owed by so many to so few
History of the Condon Lectures at Oregon State
George Moore Seminar
The George Moore Seminar is named to honor the career and contributions of Dr. George W. Moore. Dr. Moore spent his career working for the U.S. Geological Survey where he focused on regional tectonic and structural problems. After retirement, he moved to Corvallis, where he volunteered for the Department of Geosciences in a wide variety of capacities. At the time of his death, George was working on a book about the geology of wine in Oregon.
- 2023 - Thure Cerling - Environments of human evolution in Africa: Some isotopic answers to intriguing, improbable, and (at times) impossible questions
- 2022 - Kathy Cashman - Onset and impacts of the c.7700 ybp eruption of Mount Mazama, OR
- 2020 - Julia Clarke - Voices from the past: How we approach estimation of acoustic characteristics of extinct animals
- 2018 - Kenneth Ridgway - Cenozoic flat-slab subduction processes and the tectonic development of southern Alaska
- 2014 - Tullis C. Onstott - The hidden universe