In August, I wrote about some experiments on maar formation being conducted at UB’s facility for experimental volcanology (to which I mainly contributed by digging holes). Well, there were some camera crews around at the time, and we’ve just received the link to the video and interviews they recorded about the experiments! (Warning: the sound is very unbalanced between the shots of the experiments and the interviews with Dr. Valentine, who’s the head of the Center for Geohazards Studies here at UB. He’s not really that loud, it’s just the sound being wonky, but you should keep your speakers turned down to begin with.)

The original video is posted at https://review.bellmedia.ca/view/1189312581  - we’ve been told that it aired sometime in September, probably on the Canadian version of the Discovery Channel.

I get a brief moment of camera time in the beginning – I’m the digger wearing the straw hat. (And by camera time I mean, look, you can see me! No one interviews the diggers.) The results of this experiment have already been published in GRL (“Experimental craters formed by single and multiple buried explosions and implications for volcanic craters with emphasis on maars” by Valentine et al.), and it turns out (as you’ll see in the video) that they take a step toward resolving a dispute about how maar craters are formed. Check it out!