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9 January 2017
Fast-forward your volcano
Remember a couple of months ago when Google Earth Timelapse got updated? I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at it back then, but I’ve taken it for a spin since then and – being a volcanologist – decided to look at volcanoes. And it turned out to be a lot of fun.
18 May 2011
National Geographic’s “X-Ray Earth”
On Sunday night, I watched the National Geographic Channel’s new special “X-Ray Earth”. From the commercials advertising it, I thought the show might be interesting; it looked like there would be a significant part devoted to remote sensing techniques that I (and other Earth scientists) are familiar with using – and the show didn’t disappoint me.
26 March 2010
Video Friday
Still waiting to hear on some info for the next Santiaguito Observatory post, but in the meantime, here’s a neat video to keep your attention: A view of an eruption filmed with a Forward-Looking-Infrared, or FLIR camera. (These are the cameras that you sometimes see on ghost-hunting shows when they’re trying to find “cold spots”, or what you might use to look for heat leaks if you’re evaluating your house …
27 March 2009
Santiaguito lava dome complex
If seeing this first thing in the morning doesn’t both make you want to jump up and down in excitement AND say, “Oh, shit, I just spent the entire night unconscious and three klicks away from an erupting volcano,” you are either clinically dead or an alien. A composite of Santiaguito, gently steaming in the 6AM sunlight. This is both a fascinating and depressing time – fascinating because I could …
29 October 2008
More evidence for water on Mars
And guess how they know? Opal! (Here’s another article, and here is a link to a PDF of the original article in Geology.) Score for mineralogy! This interests me at the moment for a number of reasons, besides the fact that finding out anything new about Mars is just cool. First reason: I’m taking a remote sensing class right now, and we’re getting ready to do projects that involve tasks …
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.