13 May 2012
Sidetracked: Cave of the Winds, Los Alamos
Well, I had planned to work on my Bancroft posts this week, but in all the packing hoopla I realized that I left my field notes in Buffalo, which doesn’t help me much while I’m here in Los Alamos. So you’re just going to have to settle for some photos from the hike I took yesterday along the Quemazon trail to the Cave of the Winds.
4 May 2012
Bancroft (a preview)
I was hoping to publish a really great set of posts on my recent trip to Bancroft, Ontario (metamorphic petrology galore), but the blogs have been having a few issues with image uploading. So until I can both upload the photos I want and have the time to comment on them properly, this will just be a teaser post with a few photo highlights.
The point of the excursion was to examine a progression of metamorphic facies formed under medium (Barrovian) pressure/temperature conditions. So our trip took us from Greenschist to Amphibolite to Granulite facies, all the way up to the point where the rocks gave up metamorphosing and just started to melt instead (migmatites!) There were also a few detours to mines because hey, mines are fun, especially when they have sodalite. And leucite crystals as big as your face.
25 April 2012
Hot s(tuff)
Volcanic tuff isn’t a particularly strong rock, but it easy to carve and shape, which is why it’s a very popular building material. Naples, Italy is especially known for this; the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff, Campanian Ignimbrite and Piperno Tuff, all formed by eruptions of the Campi Flegrei caldera, are three of the units quarried the most often for dimension stone. In “How tough is tuff in the event of fire?”, M. J. Heap et al. take a look at a potential threat to structures built from tuff.
18 April 2012
Mineralogy Etymology
It seems like everyone enjoyed the post on the etymology of volcanology vocab, and I did mention something about mineralogy, so…here it is! I’ve mostly pulled up minerals that I deal with in volcanology. (This is just a quick collection – hopefully I’ll get around to posting more once I’m done with my latest round of grad school craziness. Oh, committee meetings…)
10 April 2012
Volcanology Etymology
In my liberal-arts-undergraduate life, I ended up taking a few linguistics classes to fulfill the requirements for my anthropology minor. I actually had a lot of fun, especially when we started talking about the etymology of words in modern English (otherwise known as, ‘stolen from everyone else’). Working out the component parts of a word is one of my favorite tricks for learning new vocab (I also play this game when I’m trying to deal with other languages, especially ones with a Latin base. It really works!) So this weekend I started thinking about the specialized vocabulary that geologists use.
4 April 2012
Talking with undergrads about ‘nontraditional’ careers in the geosciences
So for anyone who was interested, my careers talk back in March went pretty well. It was an intro class, so I’m assuming that getting any of them to ask questions right before lunch was a success! Because this was an intro class, I went in with the assumption that very few of the students had any real conception of what a geologist ends up doing aside from what they see in the movies (bad examples for the most part) and what they experience in classes (teachers they see a few times a week but don’t have time to connect with). I presented a very linear concept of a geological career: take classes, get a degree, go into government or industry work OR get another degree, teach or do one of the former two options. Then I showed them the list of everyone I could find who got creative with their geologic experience.
28 March 2012
If you were to wander into my office this afternoon…
…this is the scene you’d see playing out.
25 March 2012
Geologist’s bookshelf: Older offerings
I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes to books, especially geological ones. I’ve got quite a few that I’ve collected but never really had time to read. (When you read journal articles at work all day, sometimes you really don’t want to read about more geology when you go home. Because I also have a lot of fantasy and scifi books, those are what tend to end up on the bedside table instead.) More often then not, the books I collect are older, because buying a lot of new ones can get expensive when you’re on a grad student budget.
18 March 2012
Fossil interlude: Eighteen Mile Creek, New York
The weather has been freakishly nice for March in Buffalo, so yesterday I decided to chuck any ideas of getting work done and went fossiling with a friend instead. The area where I live sits right on top of the Devonian Onondaga limestone, so I’m already surrounded by a very fossiliferous unit (it’s full of things like coral and brachiopods and crinoids). But for a special locale, it’s worth it to head down to Eighteen Mile Creek, which flows into Lake Erie about 12 miles southwest of Buffalo.
10 March 2012
Learning moments in geology movies
Between digging into fluid dynamics papers, figuring out stability fields for alteration minerals and generally dealing with being a grad student, I haven’t had a lot of time to post lately. (Plus I had to do my taxes this weekend…) But I did get great comments on the “Survival Geology” post, especially about using movies and TV to teach science, and I thought I’d run with some thoughts on those. …
Jessica Ball is a graduate student in the Department of Geology at State University of New York at Buffalo, where she is learning how to safely and productively play with very hot rocks. Her PhD research focuses on the interaction of water and lava domes, and involves both field investigations and modeling applications. Her blogging covers a range of topics, from life as a grad student to geoscience outreach to (of course!) her field and lab work in volcanology.
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