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22 May 2013
Help for Moore, Oklahoma
The news coverage of the destruction from the tornadoes in Oklahoma is pretty devastating. Rather than watch endless shots of newscasters wandering through the rubble, I’ve been paying attention to folks in the geoblogosphere who are speaking to the science as well as the disaster – particularly Dan Satterfield over at Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal. He’s been doing a fantastic job blogging and tweeting about not only the scientific aspects of the tornado but the situation on the ground. As much as I wish I could be out doing disaster prevention work, I’m not able to just yet. But there are other ways to help.
1 November 2012
High Magmafication: Geopoetry, Accretionary Wedge #51
I’m cutting it close this time, I know – today is the deadline for Geosphere’s Accretionary Wedge call for posts on Geopoetry. One of my favorite books is a slim little volume called “A Geological Miscellany”. It’s a collection of geology-related letters, stories, poems and prose reaching back all the way to Pliny, and it has some hilarious excerpts. One of my favorites is a poem that’s attributed to the Pick and Hammer Club of the USGS…okay, actually a song…okay, actually a song set to a very ear-wormy tune from 1950 called ‘Music, Music, Music’.
5 August 2012
Good luck to Curiosity and the MSL teams!
You’ve probably been reading exciting things about tonight’s landing from my fellow AGU Geolblogger, Ryan Anderson of the Martian Chronicles. He’s been doing a fantastic job of covering the upcoming landing (at 1:31 AM EDT tomorrow morning, or 10:31 PM tonight for the folks at JPL), and I’ve been following his posts with fascination. But I’ve also got another reason to be interested: Danny Krysak, a former UB grad student and one of my good friends, is now working at Malin Space Science Systems and is part of the camera team for Curiosity! He’s every bit as excited about tonight, and I wanted to take the chance to wish both Danny and Ryan a fantastic (and successful) landing!
25 July 2012
On break (briefly)
If you’ve been wondering at the lack of posts, it’s because I’ve skipped over to the other side of the border to examine the effects of soil and bedrock on grape cultivation. I’ll be back with photos next week!
18 June 2012
Blown away by Bancroft: Part III
On the second afternoon of our trip, we finally began moving out of the greenschist facies into the amphibolite facies – higher pressures, higher temperatures and a different set of minerals.
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!
19 May 2012
Grab Bag: IVM-Fund T-shirts, solar power on campus, and an eclipse
The end of the semester is always a mess in terms of getting things done, and that includes writing blog posts. Compound this with a research trip to a national lab during which I’m spending a lot of time squinting at code, and I hope you’ll understand why my posting has been a bit sparse (and wildly varying in topic). There are a few posts that I’ve “orphaned” in the past few weeks, and I thought it would be worth it to do a quick rundown of things; I may or may not get to writing more about these in the future.
4 April 2012
Talking with undergrads about ‘nontraditional’ careers in the geosciences
So for anyone who was interested, my careers talk back in March went pretty well. It was an intro class, so I’m assuming that getting any of them to ask questions right before lunch was a success! Because this was an intro class, I went in with the assumption that very few of the students had any real conception of what a geologist ends up doing aside from what they see in the movies (bad examples for the most part) and what they experience in classes (teachers they see a few times a week but don’t have time to connect with). I presented a very linear concept of a geological career: take classes, get a degree, go into government or industry work OR get another degree, teach or do one of the former two options. Then I showed them the list of everyone I could find who got creative with their geologic experience.
28 March 2012
If you were to wander into my office this afternoon…
…this is the scene you’d see playing out.
25 March 2012
Geologist’s bookshelf: Older offerings
I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes to books, especially geological ones. I’ve got quite a few that I’ve collected but never really had time to read. (When you read journal articles at work all day, sometimes you really don’t want to read about more geology when you go home. Because I also have a lot of fantasy and scifi books, those are what tend to end up on the bedside table instead.) More often then not, the books I collect are older, because buying a lot of new ones can get expensive when you’re on a grad student budget.
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.