7 May 2018
For media inquiries about the Kilauea Eruption
Please contact the Western USGS Office of Communications directly at [email protected]. As an employee of the USGS, I prefer to route all inquiries made about the current eruption at Kilauea through them. (I am assisting with the social media response and don’t have a lot of time for interviews at the moment.) You can also find direct emails and phone numbers at https://www.usgs.gov/news/media-contacts UPDATE: If you just have questions but are …
21 April 2018
Journalism catastrophe WAITING TO HAPPEN! (or, Let’s talk about headlines)
The best science reporting in the world is diminished when you publish it under a histrionic headline.
12 March 2018
Improving the interview-a-scientist assignment

Nearly every scientist who’s active on social media or blogging gets requests from students to answer questions for interview-a-scientist assignments. Now, I love the intent of these assignments, which is to get students excited about a science topic by connecting them with an actual living, breathing scientists. However, the execution can be a problem for the scientists.
2 February 2018
Rehearsing for eruptions

In the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to help run several “tabletop” exercises with the USGS and our partners where we walk through a timeline of what might happen during a volcanic eruption, and ask participants to make decisions about how they would need to respond and work together. I find them both fascinating and exhausting.
22 December 2017
10 years
It’s not very often that someone my age gets to celebrate a 10-year anniversary. But this year is one of those times, because it’s been 10 years since I graduated from college, 10 years since I started my first job, and 10 years since I started this blog.
28 November 2017
Taking a breather

So I’ve definitely been letting the blogging and tweeting drop off for a couple of months now, and there are a few reasons for that. The first is that I’ve taken on some new responsibilities at work and I’m now a USGS Social Media Ambassador, which means that some of the USGS Volcanoes content you see is being produced by yours truly. This means, however, that I don’t access my …
22 September 2017
The human side of volcanology at IAVCEI 2017

Every four years, the volcanological community gets together somewhere in the world to spend a week (or two) talking about…you guessed it, volcanoes. And because volcanology – like any ‘disaster science’ – occupies a special intersection of geologic processes and human impacts, there is an inherent social science aspect in its practice.
7 August 2017
Vacationing at volcanoes: Mount Sibayak

Berastagi, a city in northern Sumatra, is a great place for volcanoes, because it has two active ones: Mount Sibayak and Mount Sinabung. Active takes on a different context here; to the locals, Sinabung is active, and dangerous, while Sibayak, which hasn’t erupted in living memory, is not.
16 June 2017
Vacationing at volcanoes: The Toba Caldera

Visiting one of the largest volcanic lakes (and calderas) in the world in northern Sumatra: Toba Caldera