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15 October 2013
Ada Lovelace Day, “A Passion for Science”, and Earth Science Week
This year, Earth Science Week just happens to fall right before my (gasp!) final thesis defense. I’m deep into powerpoint construction and worrying myself crazy about the fact that that’s only a few more days away, but I have done something special this year to help celebrate the accomplishments of an Earth scientist – and, in this case, a woman. In light of the recent events concerning Dr. Danielle Lee and …
21 August 2013
Update
It’s been very quiet around here, mainly because I’ve been working nonstop to finish writing my dissertation. (By ‘nonstop’ I mean I’m dreaming about figures and waking up a couple of times a night to write notes down on the pads I’ve started leaving around my apartment…) At any rate, posting is going to be spotty for the next month or so, until I get the craziness back to manageable …
18 January 2013
Water in really big groups of hot rocks: When you can’t say “hydrothermal alteration and lava dome collapse hazards”
By now you’ve hopefully seen the geo-meme that Anne Jefferson over at Highly Allocthonous started using the Up-Goer-Five text editor, which forces you to write a description of something using only the thousand most commonly used words in the English language. (It’s based off of this XKCD comic.) Anne challenged the geobloggers to write about their own research using this method, and as much as I enjoy adapting my writing for a wide audience (that’s why I got into blogging!), it’s darn hard to write about hydrothermal alteration in lava domes when you can’t use any of those words (not even dome). Thank goodness rock is still in there, or I’d be in trouble! As it is, I had a bit of trouble describing lava domes and hydrothermal circulation:
30 June 2012
Accretionary Wedge #47: Nostalgia for notetaking
Jennifer at Fuzzy Science is hosting this month’s Accretionary Wedge, and this time we’re talking about field notes. For me, this is a pretty nostalgic discussion, since I haven’t been out do to field work for my own research since 2010. I’ve been on field trips since then, certainly, but notetaking sometimes gets sidelined in favor of other trip activities when you’re not doing it for work or research. Also, my research right now involves a lot of time dealing with computer simulations, so I still take lab notes, but they’re not like recording a field experience.
9 November 2010
Common mistakes in reporting on volcanic eruptions
Volcanoes have been getting a lot of media attention this year, which is not surprising; natural disasters make for exciting stories. But your average reporter is likely not going to hold themselves to the same standards of research that science writers do, which ends up being detrimental to everyone, including their readers. Part of this may be because natural disaster stories are quickly written and not well fact-checked in an …
5 June 2010
Volcanoes everywhere…Is there a link? (EARTH Magazine article)
Like Brian over at Clastic Detritus and Callan of Mountain Beltway, I’ve also recently contributed an article to EARTH Magazine’s website. Mine talks about the recent eruptions at Pacaya and Tungurahua, with a little bit of exposition on the inevitable question of whether they’re linked. (Nope!) I’m digging into some research in the next few weeks, so posting will be a little sparse (again). I’ll try to get the Volcano …
23 December 2008
Happy Anniversary to Me! One Year of Geoblogging
Yesterday was my one-year “blogiversary”! Just one day after Callan’s, actually, which is something that I didn’t realize until this week. This is a strangely appropriate photo – it’s from my 18th birthday party. Yes, that’s a volcano cake. Yes, I am a dork. Then again, who wouldn’t want a cake that erupts lava and destroys villages? Looking back on my very first post, I’m glad that I moved from …
6 February 2008
Textbook tribulations
An interesting part of my job is that I end up doing a lot of different (read totally unrelated) things. Since I work for a non-profit organization, we can’t just hire people on whenever we have a new project or come up with new duties that need to be taken care of, so current employees pick up the slack. Asking someone in my office to tell you their job history …
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.