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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’.
4 May 2012
Bancroft (a preview)
I was hoping to publish a really great set of posts on my recent trip to Bancroft, Ontario (metamorphic petrology galore), but the blogs have been having a few issues with image uploading. So until I can both upload the photos I want and have the time to comment on them properly, this will just be a teaser post with a few photo highlights.
The point of the excursion was to examine a progression of metamorphic facies formed under medium (Barrovian) pressure/temperature conditions. So our trip took us from Greenschist to Amphibolite to Granulite facies, all the way up to the point where the rocks gave up metamorphosing and just started to melt instead (migmatites!) There were also a few detours to mines because hey, mines are fun, especially when they have sodalite. And leucite crystals as big as your face.
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.