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21 January 2020
Where On (Google) Earth #603
Last week, in a moment of random thought, I suggested reviving our beloved Where On Google Earth (#WOGE). @i_rockhopper got to work right away restarting the contest, and I tracked down the image, thus earning myself the right to host the next and an hour of handicap according to the Schott Rule. Here’s your next challenge in this geoscience reverse image search!
7 August 2017
Vacationing at volcanoes: Mount Sibayak
Berastagi, a city in northern Sumatra, is a great place for volcanoes, because it has two active ones: Mount Sibayak and Mount Sinabung. Active takes on a different context here; to the locals, Sinabung is active, and dangerous, while Sibayak, which hasn’t erupted in living memory, is not.
9 January 2017
Fast-forward your volcano
Remember a couple of months ago when Google Earth Timelapse got updated? I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at it back then, but I’ve taken it for a spin since then and – being a volcanologist – decided to look at volcanoes. And it turned out to be a lot of fun.
22 November 2016
Serenity in blue
During my visit to Iceland, I got to visit glaciers up close and personal for the first time, and one of the places we stopped was at Jökulsárlón, the pro-glacial lagoon at the terminus of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier.
22 October 2016
Ísland: Floods
When you bring together volcanoes and ice – as many places in Iceland do – you get floods. Specifically, they’re called jökulhlaups, which literally means “glacier run” but in reality means a glacial outburst flood. Originally the term was used for subglacial outburst floods from Vatnajökull ice cap, which covers the Grímsvötn and Öræfajökull volcanoes, but it’s come to mean any large, abrupt release of water from under a glacier or from a lake at the glacier front.
28 September 2016
Ísland: Volcanoes
If you’re a volcanologist – or really any geology buff who appreciates volcanoes – Iceland is flat-out paradise.
8 September 2016
Ísland: Rifts
Flying from the West Coast to Iceland doesn’t leave you a lot of time for sleeping, and neither does the prospect of standing on the on-land expression of a mid-ocean rift.
9 August 2016
Work or pleasure? Taking a geoscientist on vacation
I’m getting ready to take my first long vacation-with-friends in quite a while, and I’m very happy to be following the trend of geologists going to Iceland. Suffice to say that there will be scads of photos when I’m there, when I get back, and probably for a few months afterwards. (Can you tell I’m excited?)
27 June 2016
Yellowstone hot springs: Upsetting your color scale
I was fortunate enough to spend several weeks in Yellowstone National Park this summer, doing geophysical surveys in hydrothermal areas. I’ll be talking about those elsewhere in a few weeks (keep an eye on the AGU Instagram!), but in the meantime I wanted to show off some of the other excellent features of the park. Fieldwork in Yellowstone – and especially fieldwork with electrical equipment – is at the mercy of …
15 January 2016
Hunting blueschist (with bonus newt)
My first hike of the new year was to the Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos. Fellow USGS postdoc Kayla Iacovino (@kalyai) came along to help search for blueschist-facies rocks in what’s locally known as Franciscan Complex melange. Now, I’m getting pretty good at spotting serpentinite – not that it isn’t fairly distinctive – but I’ve been hoping to see some blueschist as well. I found this USGS publication which shows a sample of blueschist from a spot “near” Lexington Reservoir in Santa Clara county, so that was where we headed.
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.