A Duke University professor will give a talk at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre tomorrow night – sort of.

Dr. Avner Vengosh, a professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the North Carolina university, will Skype in for a presentation on the environmental and human health impacts associated with fracking.

Vengosh has been studying the issue for roughly the last seven years.

The event is being hosted by Yukoners Concerned About Oil and Gas Exploration/Development.

Don Roberts, a member of the group, said today Vengosh agreed to give the talk after having been to Whitehorse a year and a half ago to give a similar talk at the Alpine Bakery.

“We believe (fracking) is a serious issue,” said Roberts.

He said Yukoners Concerned is not against industry, mining nor development, but the organization does worry about having proper regulations and infrastructure in place.

He said the talk by Vengosh is, in part, a response to criticism the group has had that the arguments of Yukoners Concerned are not science-based.

Roberts said Vengosh has been doing work on the effects of fracking in the U.S., with a focus on the waste that results from drilling and fracking.

“They’ve been fracking the hell out of the country (the U.S.) and they’re starting to realize there are some consequences,” said Roberts.

According to Vengosh, whose research has looked at fracking in various locations including North Dakota, some of those consequences include spills.

“North Dakota is similar to Yukon in terms of climate and in North Dakota, we found there are thousands of spills from oil, from oil shale, and from fracking wells, mostly associated with leaking from pipes which we think is related to the extreme conditions,” he said in an interview today.

One of the ways Vengosh thinks drilling operations could potentially guard against spills and leaks would be to build a set of baseline data in the proposed drilling area, then continually measure water quality to ensure it’s not changing and contaminating surrounding soil and water.

Vengosh said this type of monitoring has not happened so far in the U.S., but he suspects it could minimize the impact of a practice like fracking. With Thursday’s talk, as with similar talks Vengosh has given in the last, he said he aims to give some balance to the opposing perspectives people tend to have when it comes to fracking (they dismiss potential for contamination, or they “freak out” about it), though he says every location has different issues to consider.

In a state such as Pennsylvania, where there is a history of heavy industry, and what Vengosh calls an “already interrupted system”, fracking might not be as bad.

“In the Yukon, this is one of the last pristine environments, so I think the question, more than the contamination, is ‘is this OK to have this area becoming an industrial area?’”

In addition to the Whitehorse event, Roberts said, there will be public events in Dawson City and Mayo.

He said there could also be groups in the Northwest Territories that organize to watch the presentation together.

Yukoners Concerned will try to record the talk and upload it, but Roberts said the public event is important to them because it will give members of the public a place to come together and discuss issues after the fact, rather than just watching at home in isolation.

The event will be livestreamed on YouTube through the account of Yukoners Concerned (“Yukoners Concerned about Oil and Gas Exploration”).

Tomorrow’s talk will begin at 6:30 p.m.