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
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.