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18 March 2012
Fossil interlude: Eighteen Mile Creek, New York
The weather has been freakishly nice for March in Buffalo, so yesterday I decided to chuck any ideas of getting work done and went fossiling with a friend instead. The area where I live sits right on top of the Devonian Onondaga limestone, so I’m already surrounded by a very fossiliferous unit (it’s full of things like coral and brachiopods and crinoids). But for a special locale, it’s worth it to head down to Eighteen Mile Creek, which flows into Lake Erie about 12 miles southwest of Buffalo.
12 November 2010
Natural gas seeps in Western NY
One of the first things that everyone comments on when I tell them that I’m studying volcanology at Buffalo is the lack of volcanoes. Indeed, there is a serious lack of volcanoes, one that’s compounded by the fact that the area is underlain by sedimentary rock – not an igneous intrusion in sight. Still, there are some really neat things to see here (a waterfall comes to mind…) There’s a lot of green space in and around Buffalo (including a number of Olmstead parks), and in some of the parks I’ve visited are features that people commonly refer to as ‘eternal flames’. Unlike the ones you see at memorials in cemeteries, these are natural gas seeps that are lit on fire by geologists pyromaniacs curious observers.
15 November 2009
Little Rock City
Long time, no writing! I hate dropping the ball, but schoolwork has to come first. Anyway, I spent part of this weekend exploring the geology of Western New York – specifically, south of Buffalo in Cattaraugus County. Cattaraugus County moves away from the carbonate sequences that you see around Buffalo and into Late Devonian sandstones and shales. On the map to the left, they’re shown in a sort of pistachio …
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.