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16 October 2012
Benchmarking Time: Fish Lake Hightop, Utah
For this week’s benchmark, I thought I’d share one of my favorites: the USGS marker on the highest point in my undergraduate field area, the Fish Lake Plateau in Utah. Fish Lake itself, which sits in a graben, is bounded by Mytoge Mountain on its southeast side and the Fish Lake Hightop on the northwest. The Hightop is accessible from the Pelican Canyon Trail, which leads you over a moraine and up a lovely glacial valley.
9 October 2012
Benchmarking Time: Al-Bana, Sultanate of Oman
I’m in the process of regrouping after a full weekend field trip back to Bancroft, so in the meantime, here’s a guest Benchmarking post from Evelyn over at Georneys. Evelyn writes:
Here’s a picture of a benchmark in the Sultanate of Oman on a hill overlooking the village of Al-Bana. I’ve also included a picture of the view from the benchmark– you can see an old watchtower and the village of Al-Bana. Jebel Misht is the mountain in the background. Finally, I’ve included a picture to prove that I was actually there as well as a pretty view of Jebel Misht.
28 September 2012
Benchmarking time: Mauna Kea, Hawaii
In the course of my field work, I’ve gotten in the habit of ‘collecting’ benchmarks with photos, but I didn’t know hunting for benchmarks was an actual named activity! The great Wikipedia assures me that ‘benchmarking’ or ‘benchmark hunting’ is an actual thing, with its own fansites and everything. The Geocaching.com website even has a section devoted to benchmarking. It’s a big thing. At any rate, I thought it would be a fun activity to post photos of my benchmarks each week – and, like Callan’s Friday Fold, to ask for photos of your favorite benchmarks! I’ll start with my favorite, the USGS benchmark on top of Mauna Kea’s highest point.
26 June 2012
Blown away by Bancroft: Part IV
On the last morning of our Bancroft field trip this past April, we continued our journey through the metamorphic faces diagram with a stop at an outcrop north of Bancroft on ON-28, in the amphibolite facies.
21 May 2012
Eclipse + caldera = an excellent evening for a volcanologist
I had the excellent opportunity to view today’s annular eclipse from the top of Pajarito Mountain, just outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico. I had the excellent opportunity to view today’s annular eclipse from the top of Pajarito Mountain, just outside of Los Alamos, New Mexico. What an amazing time!
13 May 2012
Sidetracked: Cave of the Winds, Los Alamos
Well, I had planned to work on my Bancroft posts this week, but in all the packing hoopla I realized that I left my field notes in Buffalo, which doesn’t help me much while I’m here in Los Alamos. So you’re just going to have to settle for some photos from the hike I took yesterday along the Quemazon trail to the Cave of the Winds.
13 November 2011
Archival Gold: Imaggeo
I’ve run through quite a few of my royalty-free geoscience photo resources, but Erik Klemetti and Matt Hall mentioned a new one this week: Imaggeo, an open-access collection maintained by the European Geosciences Union. The photo collection is currently small, but the photo quality is top-notch.
31 October 2011
Happy Halloween!
After all, what better medium for a volcanologist than something that glows such a lovely orange?
7 September 2011
Catching up
It’s been a while since my last post, for various reasons – family matters and beginning-of-the-semester hoopla among them. I hope to be blogging regularly again soon, but in the meantime, I’ll have to make do with posting a few of my favorite photos from this summer. (Which was also a time of interrupted blogging, but for natural-disaster-based reasons rather than human ones.)
10 June 2011
Valles Caldera
I meant to post this last year after my brief trip to Los Alamos, but now that I’m back on the Hill for the summer, it seems a shame not to show off the scenery!
The Jemez Volcanic Field in northern New Mexico – which includes the Valles Caldera – straddles the Rio Grande Rift in the east and the Colorado Plateau in the west. The Jemez contains volcanic rocks erupted from >13 to 0.13 million years ago, with compositions ranging from basalt (low silica content) to rhyolite (high silica). The best known of these is the Bandelier Tuff, a thick sequence of pyroclastic deposits which were erupted in several phases around 1.62 to 1.25 million years ago. The total volume of material in the Bandelier is around 300 cubic km (~75 cubic miles), and it covers much of the area in the Jemez Volcanic Field. (The Bandelier tends to be unwelded and relatively soft, and canyons have cut down through it in many places, creating wonderful vertical exposures as well as the mesas and plateaus that Los Alamos is built on.)
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.