In the Company of Volcanoes

- Dr. Janine Krippner and Dr. Alison Graettinger Conferences mean many things. We get to see our co-blogger in person, go on field trips where we learn about new volcanoes from the people who have studied them, attend workshops and panels, make new friends, and race from talk to poster sessions to take in as much volcano science as we can. The International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior (IAVCEI) 2017 conference is being held in Portland Oregon this August. The theme is 'Fostering Integrative Studies of Volcanism'. The conference will be attended by more than 1,000 volcanologists from around the world and many will be sharing their experience on Twitter using the hashtag #IAVCEI2017 . This year we are both going on field trips and presenting some of our recent research at this conference so there will be a lot of conference to share. Janine will be presenting her work on the Shiveluch dome collapse events and block-and-ash flow (BAF...

Dr. Alison Graettinger The scale of geologic history is not just spread over a larger time span than many of us are used to thinking about, but also a larger physical scale. To help train future geologists to be comfortable with these large scales, and three dimensional challenges of our planet's history, we take students out into the field and make them map, the old fashioned way, by hand. I went with the UMKC field camp this June to learn about the places and projects that we use to train our geology majors as I will likely take over leading the camp in the future. UMKC field camp students putting boots on rocks and pencils to paper to gain experience making geologic maps in South Dakota. For many people the idea of making a map seems outdated. People hear words like map and geography and assume that it is all done, and they only have to worry about changing country boundaries. Maps, however, are a means of conveying information in a spatial way, that doesn't just in...