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22 April 2013
Remembering to be small: Accretionary Wedge #56
As geologists, we spend a lot of time looking for the big picture. We want to know how a mountain range formed, or where tectonic plates were millions of years ago, or what global repercussions an eruption could have, or what effect the melting of an ice sheet could have on sea level around the world. We think about time in boggling spans that far exceed anything we could experience in a single lifetime – millions, even billions of years. And we are always trying to tell far-reaching stories to explain the history of our planet, using words and figures and photos.
8 March 2013
My experience as a woman in the geosciences
Being deep in the throes of thesis-wrangling has left me little time for blogging lately, but as a woman and a geoscientist I definitely thought it was important to write a little bit about International Women’s Day, and about my own experiences. I first became aware that this was a day of celebration when my graduate advisor and I encountered a parade in downtown Xela when we were in Guatemala doing fieldwork for my thesis. It was a beautiful day and the parade-goers were lively and excited and enthused.
24 February 2013
So you want to be a volcanologist?
In addition to my blogging and on-again-off-again relationship with Twitter, I like to take my geologizing to places outside the office. Just yesterday, I had the opportunity to talk with a girls’ STEM club at my old elementary school about being a volcanologist. I actually do this fairly often, and I’m always really impressed by the questions the students come up with. They’re always inquisitive and thoughtful, and often catch me off guard – which is good!
14 February 2013
Love (of fieldwork) hurts! Accretionary Wedge #55)
Maitri’s hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge, and she’s asking us to share our battle scars (or “geo-injuries”). For some reason, this struck me as an excellent topic to talk about on Valentine’s day, so instead of showing you photos of heart-shaped lava fountains or volcanic bombs, I’m getting into the real bloody side of field work.
27 January 2013
Benchmarking Time: Mount Terrill, Fish Lake Plateau, Utah
The next benchmark in my collection is another from Fish Lake in Utah. This is one of my favorite places to do field work, despite the fact that quite a bit of it is vertical and I was cursed with a malfunctioning set of knees. Occasionally I do make it to the top of things, and as we know, geologists like to put benchmarks in high places. Mount Terrill, on the northern part of the Fish Lake Plateau, is one of them. It’s an interesting mountain – long and lean instead of round and bulky – and it’s one of the best places on the Plateau to get a look at the Osiris Tuff, which is the volcanic unit I studied as an undergrad.
18 January 2013
Water in really big groups of hot rocks: When you can’t say “hydrothermal alteration and lava dome collapse hazards”
By now you’ve hopefully seen the geo-meme that Anne Jefferson over at Highly Allocthonous started using the Up-Goer-Five text editor, which forces you to write a description of something using only the thousand most commonly used words in the English language. (It’s based off of this XKCD comic.) Anne challenged the geobloggers to write about their own research using this method, and as much as I enjoy adapting my writing for a wide audience (that’s why I got into blogging!), it’s darn hard to write about hydrothermal alteration in lava domes when you can’t use any of those words (not even dome). Thank goodness rock is still in there, or I’d be in trouble! As it is, I had a bit of trouble describing lava domes and hydrothermal circulation:
22 December 2012
5 years already?!
Wow.
It certainly doesn’t seem like I’ve spent a significant chunk of my life blogging, but the calendar doesn’t lie: it’s been 5 years since my first post on Magma Cum Laude. When I first started, I never really imagined that this would become such a big part of my professional identity as a geoscientist, but I can’t say that I would have changed the path I’ve taken – because it’s led me to some really interesting places! Since I began this blog with the intent to write about becoming a grad student in volcanology, I’ve had the opportunity to write about everything from eruption triggering to fossiling in Western New York to numerical modeling to how many jelly beans it would take to equal the mass of a lava dome. Seriously, everything.
24 November 2012
Benchmarking Time: Devil’s Coulee dinosaur egg site, Southern Alberta
This week’s benchmark is a unique one – not your usual NGS fare! It comes to you courtesy of Howard Allen, who says:
This is a quarry marker that the Royal Tyrrell Museum cements in place at their dinosaur fossil excavations around the Province of Alberta. This particular one marks a quarry at the Devil’s Coulee dinosaur egg site in southern Alberta, near the town of Warner. The quarry marker allows the locality to be precisely marked by GPS (and/or conventional survey equipment), so it can be found again in the future.
9 November 2012
Benchmarking Time: Santiaguito Volcano Observatory, Guatemala
This week’s benchmark is another USGS one – this time in one of my favorite places, the Santiaguito Volcano Observatory in Guatemala!
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.