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| First Name | Patrick |
| Last Name | McLaren |
| Member Since | March 9, 2023 |
| patrickmclaren729@gmail.com | |
| Phone | 250-652-1334 |
| Street | 659 Beacon Street |
| City | Victoria |
| State | British Columbia |
| Zipcode | V8V 1K1 |
| Country | Canada |
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| Pen Name | |
| Branch Affiliation | BC |
| Website | patrickmclarenauthor.com |
| Blog | |
| Goodreads | |
| Bio | Dr. Patrick McLaren is a retired geologist who worked as a Research Scientist before founding a consulting company specializing in marine and coastal processes. He is a world expert in his field. Learning to be a magician in his early life (1950's and 60's) in Ottawa, he worked, when a teenager, as a cowboy in Jasper National Park. By the time he was twenty, he had hitchhiked around Europe, taken part in the first helicopter operation to map the geology of the Rocky Mountains, and spent a summer in the High Arctic (Baffin Island) carrying out glaciological research. These first twenty years are recorded in Magic Travels: The Unlikely Adventures of a Geologist, the first volume of his memoir. Taking a year off from university (1967-8), he travelled around the world. Navigating a small, leaky yawl across the South Pacific, he worked as a magician in Fiji and Australia, and was the first to warn the Australians of the dangers of global warming in a TV interview. He has confronted grizzly and polar bears, as well as poisonous snakes on King Island (Tasmania). After hitchhiking through Asia, including Afghanistan and Iran, he arrived in Europe just in time for the 1968 Russian invasion of Prague. The events of that year are described in Volume 2, soon to be published as A Year Around Earth: The Unlikely Adventures of a Geologist. As a professional geologist, he was the first scientist to dive under the ice at the North Pole (1974). Being his first dive, it came close to disaster. Obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina, he continued his High Arctic research pioneering under ice diving which provided the information for him to develop his now famous technique to determine the transport behaviour of sediments called Sediment Trend Analysis (STA). In his career he took two different ships to the High Arctic, one of which nearly sank in the Labrador Sea. He also survived two helicopter crashes. As a consultant he lived on his custom-built sailboat, GeoSea, collecting sediment samples (which provide the fundamental data required for STA) from Mexico to Alaska solving environmental problems associated with shoreline management, dredging, and remediation of contaminated sediments. He suffered a knock-down in a hurricane offshore from Cape Mendocino. Using STA, Dr. McLaren has taken part in a number of high-profile environmental lawsuits concerned with coastal developments, the effects of dredging, and the cleanup of contaminated sediments. He is particularly concerned with the fate of humans on the planet and has fought fraudulent science that is frequently applied to gain economic advantage while hastening our demise. Now seventy-five years old, he is eager to finish his story in two further volumes to make his memoir complete. |
| Publications | "Magic Travels: The Unlikely Adventures of a Geologist", self-published by FriesenPress, 2022 |
| Other Memberships | Federation of BC Writers Sidney and Peninsula Literary Society |
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| Genres | Autobiography, Biography & Memoir, Educational, Humour & Entertainment, Nonfiction, Sports & Outdoor, Travel |
| Available For | Readings, Presentations, Workshops, Book Club Meetings, Speaking Engagements |