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5 June 2013
Benchmarking Time: Kilauea Caldera and Kilauea Iki, Hawaii
Buffalo is actually a lovely place to be in the summer even though it’s feeling very summerlike right now. But I wouldn’t pass up another chance to revisit the Big Island, because it’s a fantastic place to be at any time of the year. One of my favorite parts of the island, aside from the malasada shops, is Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. (Bet you couldn’t see that one coming!) I’ve been lucky enough to go there three times – once with William & Mary’s regional geology course, once with UH Hilo’s volcanology field course, and once with my parents for vacation. I loved showing my parents the park, since I’d been there with the William & Mary crowd the year before, and because I was finally getting a chance to show them what a volcano is really like.
23 May 2013
Starting off the summer with a bang: More man-made maars
Today’s guest post was written by Alison Graettinger, a postdoc in the UB Geology department who’s working with the Center for Geohazard Studies. She was in charge of the series of maar-creation experiments I helped out at a few weeks ago, which are a followup to the experiments that I wrote about last year. She offered to put together this post so you could learn a bit about the science and international collaborations behind the experiments.
14 May 2013
Benchmarking Time: San Pedro Breakwater, Los Angeles, CA
Time to get caught up on the benchmark queue! I’m a few submissions behind, but this summer should be a good opportunity to get caught up on them. This submission comes from Marty, who has taken some great photos of the Los Angeles Harbor Light (or the Angels Gate Light) and San Pedro Breakwater in the Los Angeles Harbor.
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.
30 March 2013
Benchmarking Time: Washington, DC
I spent yesterday in downtown Washington DC, hoping to see a few cherry blossoms (it’s a big thing here), but unfortunately it’s been a bit too cold for them lately, and the peak bloom won’t be for another few days. There are a few trees out, just not in the popular areas around the Tidal Basin. What I did find were a couple of benchmarks!
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.
17 December 2012
Benchmarking Time: Hyde Pier, San Francisco
This week’s benchmark is an interesting one that I happened across during AGU’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco. The Fisherman’s Wharf area along the Bay is one of my favorite spots, and I usually take a little time to go walking down there. This time around, I was taking in the little beach near the Maritime Museum when I saw this benchmark.
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!
30 October 2012
Benchmarking Time: Antelope Island, Great Salt Lake, UT
The latest benchmark comes to you courtesy of Rick Le Mon, who’s an undergraduate tackling a challenging schedule and a senior thesis! He offers up a National Geodetic Survey gravity control marker on Antelope Island in Utah:
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.