James Franklin, an iconic figure in the Canadian mining industry and a trailblazing geologist, died on June 19. He was 81.
Franklin spent much of his career documenting the complexity of the Canadian Shield and its inherent mineral wealth. His approach and groundbreaking contributions helped develop new criteria for finding ore deposits in Canada and worldwide. Franklin began his postsecondary studies as an electrical engineer before developing a passion for geology.
Thesis work for his PhD at the University of Western Ontario took him to northwestern Ontario to study mineral deposits of the Proterozoic rocks along the north shore of Lake Superior. His work at the GSC brought him to the ocean depths in the 1980s, aboard the deep-sea submersible Alvin. He became one of the first geologists to search for ‘black smoker’ systems to better understand how VMS deposits are formed in geologically active areas on the ocean floor.