In the Company of Volcanoes

- Janine Cotopaxi volcano is Ecuador's most intensively monitored volcano. With an active past, glacier-covered summit, and surrounding population it is watched very closely by the local team of volcanologists at IGEPN . Monitoring network on and around Cotopaxi volcano that has been growing since the first seismic station installation in 1976. Courtesy of IGEPN. Cotopaxi started quietly rumbling to life again in April with an increase in seismic activity. A Seismic swarm on 14th of August preceded phreatic (water) explosions on the 15th, and now Cotopaxi is on Yellow Alert in a phase of near-continuous ash emission (for more details see the Smithsonian Reports ). The above video was posted on August 18th and shows white steam/gas plume emission and ash fall on the snowy flanks. The above video shows ash emission on the 21st of August with the ash plume that did not exceed 2 km on this day. Ashfall affected the south to west, west, and northwest of the vol...

-Alison  No, really! I’ve walked in the same places that the Apollo astronauts honed their geology skills here on Earth. Actually, many a geologist has trained in locations that were used for Apollo training for the precise reason that they are great places to learn geology. Apollo training locations include a fair number of volcanoes, a few impact craters, and other barren rocky landscapes. The point of training, after all, was to prepare them to describe the rocky and otherworldly surface of the moon, and the moon is covered in lava and lots of big impact craters.  Volcanic moon rock at the Chabot Space Center in Oakland California. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.   I encourage geologists and outdoor enthusiasts alike to check out this list of training locations and see how many places you have been that was used to prepare the Apollo astronauts for the moon. I was pleased to note how many places I have visited. In fact, many of the training lo...

 -Alison It can be very exciting to watch an erupting volcano or look at super fresh deposits. You get to see rock that was inside the earth days to moments before. The inaccessible becomes accessible, and in a dramatic way. The author touching fresh rock from Kīlauea Hawaii 2009. While I love watching active processes and fresh rock, I also love looking at rocks that have been sitting on earth's surface for millions of years waiting to share their story. The exhumed insides of volcanoes provide a great opportunity to see a more complete history of how a volcano grew. One of the cornerstones of volcanology is understanding what volcanoes have done in the past, that way we can better understand what might happen in the future. While a regularly erupting volcano like Stromboli or Etna gives us an idea of the most frequent processes, we need to look at older volcanoes to get an idea of the range of eruption types and sizes and to understand their long term growth.  ...

-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...