22 December 2010

Travels near and far: 2010

Posted by Jessica Ball

It’s my 3-year Blogiversary (for the next few minutes, anyway)! I almost can’t believe I’ve been writing so long – and that I’ve gone through so many changes since the whole thing started. Quite a ride, indeed.

This post is becoming a bit of a tradition – a continuation of a post I did at the end of last year, and one that’s been picked up by lots of other geobloggers. It’s a neat way of looking back on all the traveling I’ve done in the last twelve months, and to get me thinking about what I might do in the future. This year has been a mixture of the local and the not-so-local:

In January, I braved the cold and went north to see Niagara Falls in winter.

In February, my advisor and I and several other UB grads visited Guatemala – mainly to get back to my field area at the Santiaguito lava dome complex, but also to see a little of the rest of the country.

In March, I took another winter field trip to see a dissected drumlin at Chimney Bluffs State Park in New York.

In April, I went fossil (trilobite!) hunting at Eighteen Mile Creek, south of Buffalo.

In May, I took a walk on the beaches of Sanibel Island on the Gulf Coast of Florida. (I don’t have a good photo of my own, since beaches and cameras don’t mix all that well, but here’s a picture from Wikipedia of my favorite beach.)

In June, I spent time working on my dissertation research at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and took a weekend off to see the Valles Caldera.

In July, my advisor led a trip to the island of Montserrat in the Antilles Volcanic Arc, where we visited pyroclastic deposits of the Soufrière Hills volcano.

In August, I took time off from geology for a bit of reenacting in Pennsylvania…

September gave me some time to recover from dashing around all summer, and to get back into the grad school groove.

In October, I joined UB’s sedimentology class on their field trip to Letchworth State Park near Castile, New York.

November was a bit of a breather…

And, of course, in December I braved the horrors of bad-weather air travel to attend my first Fall AGU meeting.

And now I’m taking a well-deserved rest from traveling, research and blogging. I’ll be back with some new posts after New Year’s Day. Until then, Happy Holidays & Happy Belated Solstice to those of you celebrating them!