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26 May 2011
Weird Geology: Accretionary Wedge #34
This month’s Accretionary Wedge, hosted at En Tequila es Veridad, wants us to talk about “Weird Geology”:
Let’s face facts, people. Geology can be strange. Outrageous. Bizarre. I’m sure you’ve all run into formations and landscapes and concepts that have left you scratching your head. Maybe they got less weird later. Maybe they stayed strange. But however transient or permanent that weirdness was, it got weird. So tell us about it. Hit us with the strangest stuff you’ve got.
One location where I definitely encountered some weird geology is a field trip stop I was at several years ago in Big Bend National Park, Texas
16 February 2011
Archival Gold: National Park Service Digital Image Archive
The National Park Service Digital Image Archive is an excellent way to highlight exactly why we shouldn’t be looking only toward discretionary spending (i.e., at the Department of the Interior) as a way to save money on the budget. It’s only going to save a tiny fraction of what we could be cutting elsewhere, and it would be contributing to the neglect and loss of our national parks, which are an irreplaceable part of our geologic heritage. The NPS photo collections can be searched by park and by special topics, and you usually get a nice summary about the park before you start digging through photos. (The images are very high resolution, so loading them takes a while – but it’s worth the wait!)
5 July 2010
Bandelier National Monument
One of the neat things about Los Alamos is that Bandelier National Monument is only a few minutes away. The volcanic tuff at Bandelier erupted from the Valles caldera about 1.25 million years ago, but it’s not just a site of geologic interest; it’s also an archaeological site. Bandelier refers to Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier, a Swiss-American archaeologist who conducted research into the history of the Pueblo people in the American …
11 January 2008
Disturbing developments
Well, I’ve just seen something in the news that reinforces my opinion of how far some of our government representatives have moved on from sanity (or at least from representing the interests of some of their constituents). I’m sure this is a rather polarized issue, but I’ll risk dissenting commentary, because I think it needs to be brought to peoples’ attention. (Gun owners: I personally do not own a gun …
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.