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11 December 2018
Far from the science-ing crowd
This year, sadly, I’m not attending AGU’s Fall Meeting. It’s partly personal choice – I have several big projects scheduled for December and January – and partly that I don’t want to make two cross-country flights to go to a meeting and head home for the holidays (the timing doesn’t line up well). It’s also partly because in the USGS (and in the government in general), our choice of conferences to …
24 September 2018
For great Italian geology, go to church
There’s so much to see in Naples – so much gelato to eat – but one thing I learned was that if you want to sample the local geology, you could do worse than visit a church.
7 August 2017
Vacationing at volcanoes: Mount Sibayak
Berastagi, a city in northern Sumatra, is a great place for volcanoes, because it has two active ones: Mount Sibayak and Mount Sinabung. Active takes on a different context here; to the locals, Sinabung is active, and dangerous, while Sibayak, which hasn’t erupted in living memory, is not.
28 September 2016
Ísland: Volcanoes
If you’re a volcanologist – or really any geology buff who appreciates volcanoes – Iceland is flat-out paradise.
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.
9 August 2016
Work or pleasure? Taking a geoscientist on vacation
I’m getting ready to take my first long vacation-with-friends in quite a while, and I’m very happy to be following the trend of geologists going to Iceland. Suffice to say that there will be scads of photos when I’m there, when I get back, and probably for a few months afterwards. (Can you tell I’m excited?)
4 January 2015
Punctuated equilibrium of the career
Happy New Year! 2014 was full of big, rapid changes for me, which is what prompted me to think about the punctuated equilibrium concept.
29 September 2014
Cross-country recap, and a brief hiatus
So I’ve made it across the country, and I’m now happily settled in California and getting used to my new job as a postdoc with the USGS! However, being a federal employee means I have different regulations to follow while using social media, so I’m going to be taking a break from blogging while I sort those out. To tide you over, here are some of my favorite photos from the cross-country drive, which was a great (though long) experience.
24 August 2014
Culling the deskcrops
If you saw my post for the Geological Society’s “Speaking of Geoscience” blog, you’ll know that I’m in a transition period – finishing up my job as a policy fellow and getting ready to move on to a postdoctoral fellowship with the USGS in September. In the meantime, that means I’ve been spending a lot of my time packing all my possessions into increasing numbers of boxes, in between pecking away at various writing projects.
15 April 2014
Boulder blitz
Last week I got to spend a couple of days in lovely Boulder, CO for a meeting (fortunately right before Sunday’s snow). The meeting (which was for the Thriving Earth Exchange’s Advisory Board – keep an eye out for updates!) kept us inside a lot, but the NCAR facility that hosted us has some fantastic views of Colorado’s Front Range and the famous Flatirons. The boulders in the foreground and …
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.