Profile of Barbara Sherwood Lollar

In a laboratory nearly 2.4 kilometers under the Canadian Shield, geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar has tracked the sustained release of enough hydrogen gas from Earth’s crust to produce 4.7 million kilowatt-hours of energy per year. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2022, Sherwood Lollar revisited the Kidd Creek Mine in Ontario, Canada where, in 2013, her explorations found that waters flowing from deep fractures were 1.6 billion years old. Reported in her Inaugural Article, the findings, aided by studies of noble gases in the samples, pushed the age of Earth’s oldest waters back by hundreds of millions of years.