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3 February 2014
Benchmarking Time: Nome, Alaska
Evelyn was good enough to remind me that I should get back to showing off other people’s submissions for my benchmark series, and the recent talk of Alaska being warmer in past days than the East Coast reinforced the gentle poking. A few years back, Evelyn and her husband Jackie spent several months working in Nome, Alaska for a marine mining gold exploration company. She’s got a great series of wonderfully kitschy photos from her trip, but she was kind enough to save a few of an Army Corps of Engineers survey mark they found on one of their local hikes.
13 January 2014
Benchmarking Time: Great Falls, Maryland
On the first day of the new year, I got completely stir-crazy and drove off for a hike. I wanted to see some bedrock, but because I live on the Virginia side of the Potomac River but not far enough west to be in the Piedmont province, we don’t have rocks to look at. (We have some lovely river terraces and a whole lot of cobbles of things that came from the parts of the Piedmont and Blue Ridge where they have rock exposure, but that just doesn’t count.) So I braved Northern Virginia traffic and a chunk of the Beltway to go visit Great Falls – specifically, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park on the Maryland side.
22 December 2013
AGU Fall Meeting 2013: Photo Wrap-Up
As is traditional, I ended this year’s Fall Meeting by contracting a cold and developing an ear infection by the time I made it back to DC. (In fact, I can only think of one year where something like this didn’t happen, and I got sick over Christmas anyway.) Naturally this meant I was in no mood to do any sort of wrap-up post, and today is the first day I’ve actually felt like sitting upright for any amount of time, so I’m making up for it now.
15 November 2013
Building DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Washington D.C. is a wonderful place if you’re a geologist. Not only is it a city with a fascinating landscape history (the National Mall used to have a canal running down the middle, and before that the Tiber River and swampland took up the famous space so many tourists come to see), it’s full of rocks. But they aren’t all natural outcrops – some are what we might call man-made …
7 November 2013
Pumpkin ‘cratering’ and a farewell to Buffalo
Despite the frantic packing and last-minute paperwork of my last few days in Buffalo, I managed to take a little time on the last day to go watch a UB Geology tradition: pumpkin impact cratering. It’s an introductory lab that we usually try to do around Halloween, one that I remember teaching almost four years ago now, where students get to drop pumpkins off the roof of one of the buildings on camps and see what happens. Obviously there’s a lot more involved for the lab students – they very diligently measured the pumpkins and the resulting impact sites and cleaned up quite nicely afterwards – but as a departing grad, I got to enjoy the show without having to do any recording. It’s a fun lab and a relevant one, especially since we’ve recently seen what happens when even a relatively small body heads for the Earth.
10 September 2013
Interlude in Pittsburgh
I grew up just outside of Washington, DC, within an easy metro ride of the Smithsonian museums, so I consider myself a bit spoiled. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate other museums when I see them, and this weekend when I was down in Pittsburgh, I got to see the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. In terms of collections and curation, it’s pretty darn impressive. It must be nice to have a rich patron!
10 August 2013
Fiddling on a crater: Panther Mountain, New York
In my spare time, I play violin – orchestra, rock band, and after this past week, fiddle. I just returned from a whirlwind week at a resort in the Catskills that I spent learning how to fiddle from none other than Gaelic Storm, and on top of the fantastic time we had and wonderful people I met, the scenery wasn’t so bad either. In fact, I spent a good bit of time geeking out about the fact that the resort sits on the edge of the Panther Mountain Impact Structure.
26 July 2013
Streamflow and storms at Glen Falls
In between bouts of hottish weather (I don’t count it as hot unless it’s well into the nineties and the humidity is fairly high) and the occasional cool day like today, we’ve been having some fairly spectacular thunderstorms in Buffalo. That’s no unusual thing in the summertime, but after teaching a chunk of an intro course about streamflow and what happens after it rains, I’ve started paying more attention to water features in my area.
16 July 2013
Signs you may be a geologist (Accretionary Wedge #58)
I don’t get out for field work much anymore (in fact my entire summer has been reserved for thesis writing – grr!), but Evelyn’s call for the July Accretionary Wedge is a good chance for me to look back on past field trips and reminisce. Geologists come across a lot of signs when they do field work, and volcanologists in particular get some doozies. I had a hard time deciding on just one, so I’ve got several offerings for the Wedge, all of them from the two trips I’ve taken to Hawaii.
19 June 2013
Core Skills in the Geosciences: A Follow-up
Last April, I had a discussion with some of my fellow graduate students in the geology department here at UB about teaching. One topic raised by those of us working with senior undergraduates was the skills our students would need to have by the time they left the department. We realized that many students take winding paths on the way to finishing a major for various reasons, including that they transferred from another school, they switched majors, or they are double-majoring and have time conflicts. A winding path isn’t necessarily detrimental as long as the students come out of the process with a solid geoscience skillset. But what should that skillset include?
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.