In the Company of Volcanoes

  This post is from Ivan Torres a PhD student at the University of Missouri Kansas City who joined the MELT team from Chile in January 2022. She has written the post in Spanish (Top) and English (Bottom). This blog has always been about bringing science to more people, and Ivana's language skills will help us do expand this effort!    Días de Lava: del sueño de niñez a la ciencia Desde que entré a este mundo de re-fundir lava sobre los 1300°C, he estado subiendo contenido a las redes sociales (imágenes y videos) de algunos de los experimentos que realizamos en nuestros laboratorios en University of Missouri-Kansas (UMKC) y en las facilidades de University of Buffalo (UB). Y adivinen cuál ha sido el comentario más común en estos videos… “¡MI SUEÑO DE NIÑEZ ERA JUGAR CON LAVA!” .    Vertimiento de roca líquida en grava en junio del 2022 en las facilidades de University of Buffalo.  Pasando del hecho que trabajar con roca líquida es uno de los sueños de niñez más peligroso, lo q

- Janine Krippner Originally published on 20/9/2021 here: http://janinekrippner.weebly.com/la-palma when we did not have access to our blog. I am honestly angry about how misinformation about a small eruption has put so many people in a state of pure fear across multiple countries. There is enough stress and fear in the world and I truly feel for everyone being impacted by this. It is incredibly sad to see people losing their homes and livelihoods to this eruption, and on top of that is a tsunami of utter lies. We all need more compassion. We all need to be careful of what we share. We all need to be kinder. We all need to think more critically when we are afraid (this is a tough one). This is a bad case of the implications of people acting without these traits. People want us, the experts, to say that this scenario is impossible to ease fears, but that is something that is extremely difficult for a scientist to say. There are many scary things in this world that will not ha

 - Janine and Alison Wow it has been a few years, hasn't it? We lost access to our blog for a while there and are excited to have it back. The world has been changing a lot over the past few years and we have not been immune to this, so where are we now? Dr. Janine Krippner  Hello! Due to the pandemic and impending visa changes I moved home to New Zealand/Aotearoa after 6 months of the pandemic in the USA. After just over three years at my job at the Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program, this has been my last week. I am so very grateful for my colleagues (especially Ed Venzke, Ben Andrews, and Kadie Bennis), and I will miss working in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. That was such a fun office to be part of! So what am I doing next? I don't know. It is "normal" in this early career stage of many science fields to have rather frequent periods of job insecurity but I am taking it in with patience, and grabbing the chance to get paper