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18 March 2012
Fossil interlude: Eighteen Mile Creek, New York
The weather has been freakishly nice for March in Buffalo, so yesterday I decided to chuck any ideas of getting work done and went fossiling with a friend instead. The area where I live sits right on top of the Devonian Onondaga limestone, so I’m already surrounded by a very fossiliferous unit (it’s full of things like coral and brachiopods and crinoids). But for a special locale, it’s worth it to head down to Eighteen Mile Creek, which flows into Lake Erie about 12 miles southwest of Buffalo.
20 February 2011
A tour of deskcrops
The weather in Buffalo this weekend has gone from warm and rainy to windy and snowy to tolerably cold and sunny, with potential for more ickiness tomorrow, but for someone who likes to be warm and comfy on the weekends this doesn’t make for fantastic hiking conditions. So I decided to photograph some extremely local outcrops (otherwise known as “the ones inside the apartment, where there is heat”). None of these are actually on my desk, but I think they count as “deskcrops” (outcrops that are no longer in-situ and have often experienced extreme geographical displacement).
8 January 2011
First field trip of the year: York River, Virginia
As part of a quick trip to visit my Alma Mater earlier this week, I took an afternoon to go exploring on the shores of the York River. The river forms the northern border for the peninsula on which Williamsburg and its environs are located, and the York River (along with the James River to the south) is an excellent place to take a look at some Coastal Plain geology.
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.