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8 September 2016
Ísland: Rifts
Flying from the West Coast to Iceland doesn’t leave you a lot of time for sleeping, and neither does the prospect of standing on the on-land expression of a mid-ocean rift.
19 January 2015
Pillow basalts at Point Bonita
It’s amazing how quickly I’m capable of abandoning my blogging resolutions, really. Here we are, a couple of weeks into the new year and I’ve failed to a) post more often and b) talk about my research. (I swear I have a post in the works about that, but it’s gotten long and unwieldy and in desperate need of editing!) But this weekend I’m going to keep a couple of the other resolutions, and blog about the trip I took yesterday to the Marin Headlands.
2 December 2011
Teaching the teachers: Activities for a plate tectonics workshop
A few weeks ago, I helped co-teach a plate tectonics workshop with a fellow UB geo grad. The workshop was intended as sort of a continuing education credit for local middle school science teachers, and rather than talk at them the whole time, we decided to have the teachers try out some activities that they could adapt for their classes. Plate tectonics is a pretty broad topic, and we covered everything from the history and development of the idea to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Because we had so much to cover (it was a six-hour workshop), we did three activities – one about sea-floor spreading, one about viscosity (to go along with the volcanology bit where we talk about magma type controlling landform appearance) and one that tied seismology and subduction together.
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.