In the Company of Volcanoes

-Janine Last month I had the amazing opportunity to do field work on Tolbachik volcano in Kamchatka, Russia. I spent a week on one of the lava flows produced during the 2012-2013 eruption and was blown away by the formations and textures that the flowing rock can create. Here are some of the features that caught my eye while I was coming to the realization of just how awesome basalt can be. I'm sure you can imagine the molten rock flowing and fracturing, then oozing out when the opportunity presents itself. NASA Advanced Land Imager (ALI, on the Earth Observing-1 satellite) false color image showing the hot lava flow on December 1st, 2012. Image courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory . View of the main Tolbachik complex from camp, right next to the lava flow. This tongue of lava formed a solid shell then the still-fluid lava inside cracked it open so it could keep moving forward. Not too far under the crust is a bright oxidation discoloration - this tells us that ...

I just returned from two, very warm, weeks in Italy. The group wanted to go somewhere with volcanoes and good food, so Italy was a natural choice. While Italian geology is fascinating in its own right, that will have to be saved for a different post. Today's post is a bit of urban geology.  I found that I spent most of my time in Rome looking at the building stone, and took mostly pictures of rocks and stone. The Romans collected the most beautiful stone from their empire and then used to make buildings and show off their wealth. These stones were then scavenged from Roman sites to build the next round of impressive buildings by the Catholic Church. So when you tour buildings in Rome it includes a geologic tour of the whole Mediterranean. While most visitors expect Rome to made of endless white marble there are a range of stone types from around the far reaches of the Roman Empire. One of the classic stone types used to impress visitors is this deep red por...

-Alison So for the last two weeks both Janine and I have been off on separate field adventures. This is not uncommon for geologists in the summer. School ends and we dash off for locations with rocks we cannot get at home. I plan on doing a longer post on the cool things I observed about the insides of old eroded volcanoes soon, but not just yet as the travels are not done!  Ant hill made up of volcanic minerals from the Hopi Buttes Volcanic Field, Navajo Nation, AZ, USA. I did want to share a fun factoid about how ants help geologists when searching for specific rock types by using some examples from my recent field work. Whether or not you had an ant farm as a kid, its pretty easy to imagine the process involved in building an ant colony. The ants excavate tunnels underground and move the material from their tunnels to the surface. This material, moved grain by grain, adds up and can form a hill. As the ant colony gets larger, they bring up material from deeper undergro...