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11 December 2013
AGU Fall Meeting 2013: Tuesday
So much to do today! This morning I went to my last student breakfast, and got to tell everyone about the Thriving Earth Exchange, which is a bit like Kickstarter for science (and focuses on bottom-up, community-driven research applications. The breakfast is also a great chance to network with section leaders (and even the President of AGU!) and get yourself noticed, and the food is free, so you really should drag yourself out of bed to go.
9 December 2013
AGU Fall Meeting 2013: Monday
I’m going to try out a new approach this year, and see if I can do some ‘liveblogging’ as I attend events rather than waiting until the end of the day to do a summary. I expect, in the nature of all confererncee blogging, thatI will end up getting worse and worse at updating as the day goes on, but it’s worth an attempt!
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2 December 2013
Social Media Roundup: AGU Fall Meeting 2013
It’s that time again! Less than a week until AGU’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco and my schedule is already full with a whole slew of great sessions, events and activities. As is my annual tradition, I’ve collected a list of various social-media-related items for you to peruse.
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.
6 May 2013
End of semester update
…and I finally, finally have a chance to breathe. It’s been a really busy couple of months for me – not just because I was teaching a lecture class for the first time, but because I was also getting ready for my technical thesis defense.
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.
12 December 2012
AGU 2012 Days 4-6
As always, I’m behind on my AGU updates (possibly because I didn’t have a chance to breathe until Wednesday!) There’s so much to do, and Tuesday was the first day that the exhibits were open, which is always a time sink. Wednesday was really the first day that I had a chance to get into the science side of things and listen to some talks and visit posters. I find talks are interesting but somewhat unsatisfying in that you don’t necessarily get much time to ask questions or discuss the topic. Posters, on the other hand, pretty much guarantee that you’ll have a chance to chat about the work with the PI.
5 December 2012
AGU 2012 Days 1 – 3
I’m forgoing my day-by-day posting this year because my schedule has been nuts – I’m hardly able to finish a meeting before I have to move on to something else!
On Sunday afteernoon I arrived to happily clear skies and a relaxing ride into San Francisco. Naturally, this meant I had to immediately start going to meetitngs – training for moderrating my first oral session, and our annual student representative meeting. (Students, watch out for new developments in your sections, including webinars, mentoring programs, and new volunteer opportunities throughout AGU! The Union Council has already added three studeent and three early-career seats, and they’re looking to get students involvedd in even more ways.)
15 November 2012
Mini Maars: A followup
In August, I wrote about some experiments on maar formation being conducted at UB’s facility for experimental volcanology (to which I mainly contributed by digging holes). Well, there were some camera crews around at the time, and we’ve just received the link to the video and interviews they recorded about the experiments!
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.