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22 July 2014
Benchmarking Time: DC is all about boundaries
Washington DC is an interesting city. When the original plans were being made in the 1780s and 1790s, they called for a 100-square-mile area to be allocated for the city, and George Washington (who was President at the time) wanted to include the City of Alexandria in Virginia. But the Residence Act, passed in 1791, specified that all the federal buildings had to be on the Maryland side of the river (mostly because someone realized that the law allowed the President to choose the location and some members of Congress didn’t want him taking advantage of that and including his own property to the south of Alexandria). So we ended up with a diamond-shaped District 10 miles on a side, overlapping both Virginia and Maryland, with the actual city in Maryland.
30 December 2012
I was dreaming of a white Christmas, but geology got in the way
It hasn’t been a very white Christmas where I am right now (northern Virginia), but if you’ve been following my fellow AGU blogger Callan on Twitter, you’ll know that’s not the case in other parts of the state. And it’s definitely not the case back in Buffalo, which has been getting snow from several winter storms recently. That got me thinking about how geology – and topography – conspire to produce precipitation. (I think about this a lot more now that I live in Buffalo, since we tend to get much more snow than where I grew up, and UB has this interesting habit of rarely closing for weather.)
8 January 2011
First field trip of the year: York River, Virginia
As part of a quick trip to visit my Alma Mater earlier this week, I took an afternoon to go exploring on the shores of the York River. The river forms the northern border for the peninsula on which Williamsburg and its environs are located, and the York River (along with the James River to the south) is an excellent place to take a look at some Coastal Plain geology.
9 January 2009
Geology and the movies again…or “Why Disney’s Pocahontas Briefly Makes Me Want To Scream At The TV”
This is actually an older post I’ve been sitting on, but I wanted to get something posted this week, even if it’s not about current events. I love watching Disney movies, but occasionally the scientist gets in the way of the nostalgic enjoyment. I was reminded of this when “The Virginia Company” came up on my music player’s shuffle list. Pocahontas, which came out in 1995, is set in an …
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.