24 August 2014
Culling the deskcrops
Posted by Jessica Ball
If you saw my post for the Geological Society’s “Speaking of Geoscience” blog, you’ll know that I’m in a transition period – finishing up my job as a policy fellow and getting ready to move on to a postdoctoral fellowship with the USGS in September. In the meantime, that means I’ve been spending a lot of my time packing all my possessions into increasing numbers of boxes, in between pecking away at various writing projects.
Moving anywhere as a geologist means packing three main categories of items: books, rocks and everything else. The relatively high density of the first two categories means that any box I end up packing is likely to be a heavy one, so it’s necessary to do some culling of the rock collection before I go.
These are all getting packed…someday.
Some of my favorite “deskcrops” are large, mainly because they show features that I didn’t want to lose by breaking them down further, or because they’re too hard to break down.
Garnets from Gore Mountain, NY
Welded tuff from the Fish Lake Plateau, UT
The advantage to being a volcanologist is that some of my favorite deskcrops are made of pumice, like this one I picked up from the Soufriere Hills volcano on Montserrat.
Pumice from the February 2011 lava dome collapse and eruption at Soufriere Hills, Montserrat
Others are a little more dense (and/or fragile) and require careful wrapping:
Lava bomb from Procida Island, Italy
And the rest are just going to get scattered into whatever box doesn’t already have too many books or other heavy things.
Mica, crystalline and blue quartz, petrified wood, basalt, and pumice with a xenolith (another Montserrat find). And a lot of guidebooks.
However, this has left me with a box of mixed samples that are either 1) duplicates of things I’m keeping or 2) things I’ve forgotten to label and can’t for the life of me ever recall collecting. Most of them are either ugly, dirty or both, and there’s not much point in trying to find someone who wants them. So, they’re becoming garden decorations:
I am not patient or creative enough to bother making these into a pretty flower border…
If in the distant future an archaeology team ever decides to excavate my neighborhood, they’re going to have a hell of a time figuring out what we were doing with our landscaping. (“Well, dang, that’s not local…”)
Jessica Ball is a volcanologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, researching volcanic hydrothermal systems and stability, and doing science communication for the California Volcano Observatory. She previously worked at the Geological Society of America's Washington DC Policy Office, learning about the intersection of Earth science and legislative affairs. Her Mendenhall postdoc and PhD focused on how water affects the stability of volcanoes, and involved both field investigations and numerical modeling applications. Her blogging covers a range of topics, from her experiences in academic geosciences to science outreach and communication to her field and lab work in volcanology.
Best to you as the boxes englaciate themselves to a new edge, enshelving the moraine there.
I was putting in a new yard for a friends new house, grinding the soil into a powder for seed prep, when my 800 pound tiller started jumping around on the back of the tractor. Someone had built a road across the property some time in the past out of cutoffs from a rock milling shop. Chunks of highly polished granite and marble were not expected in a field littered with glacial erratics.
When I was a Mendenhall post-doc in Reston (2006-08), I found having a good geologic poster (satellite image of NE US and Canada advertising a NEGSA meeting) and a good rock (Rapakivi granite) on or by my desk near the office door, were great conversation pieces or “magnets” for passersby.