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22 November 2016
Serenity in blue
During my visit to Iceland, I got to visit glaciers up close and personal for the first time, and one of the places we stopped was at Jökulsárlón, the pro-glacial lagoon at the terminus of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier.
22 October 2016
Ísland: Floods
When you bring together volcanoes and ice – as many places in Iceland do – you get floods. Specifically, they’re called jökulhlaups, which literally means “glacier run” but in reality means a glacial outburst flood. Originally the term was used for subglacial outburst floods from Vatnajökull ice cap, which covers the Grímsvötn and Öræfajökull volcanoes, but it’s come to mean any large, abrupt release of water from under a glacier or from a lake at the glacier front.
30 December 2012
I was dreaming of a white Christmas, but geology got in the way
It hasn’t been a very white Christmas where I am right now (northern Virginia), but if you’ve been following my fellow AGU blogger Callan on Twitter, you’ll know that’s not the case in other parts of the state. And it’s definitely not the case back in Buffalo, which has been getting snow from several winter storms recently. That got me thinking about how geology – and topography – conspire to produce precipitation. (I think about this a lot more now that I live in Buffalo, since we tend to get much more snow than where I grew up, and UB has this interesting habit of rarely closing for weather.)
23 November 2010
Chimney Bluffs State Park: Drumlin hunting
Earlier this year, I took a (long) drive away from Buffalo to go visit some of the glacial features that “upstate” New York has to offer. Chimney Bluffs State Park is located on the shore of Lake Ontario in Sodus Bay (about halfway between Rochester and Oswego), and it’s an excellent place to see a truncated drumlin.
10 January 2008
Why yes, I do have goals
G. K. Gilbert, in his account of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906: It is the natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to see a glacier, witness an eruption and feel an earthquake. The glacier is always ready, awaiting his visit; the eruption has a course to run, and alacrity is always needed to catch its more important phases; but the earthquake, unheralded and brief, may elude …
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.