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 Thanks to an invitation to talk about rocks, something I am sure you can tell I enjoy, I got the opportunity to travel to Marrakech, Morocco in June. Talking about my research is an important and enjoyable part of my job. It is a means of sharing the latest results, reaching out to groups who study different but related fields, letting the public know what geologists like myself do, and to teach classes to the next generation of geologists. Mosaics in Marrakech, Morocco. This trip to Marrakech was for a conference of sedimentologists, where this year’s theme was to bring terrestrial and planetary scientists together to talk shop. Sedimentology is the study of rocks and the sediments that are made up of parts of other rocks, chemically precipitated rocks, and rocks that involve the help of animals to form at the Earth’s surface. Sedimentology is also the study of the processes that form, transport, and deposit the particles and chemicals that become par...

-Alison So I will be attending my very first Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) next week 3/20-3/25/2016. It is an annual gathering of folks who study all sorts of awesome things off of Earth. This includes our nearest neighbors like our moon and Mars, but also celestial object further afield, like that rubber ducky shaped comet 67P , and things beyond Pluto in the Kupier belt . I am very excited for this conference because I’ve been hearing about it for years from friends and colleagues, and my attendance means I’ve got enough data that I might be able to say something about another planet. That just blows my mind. Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko images by the European Space Agency's NAVCAM on the Rosetta spacecraft. I am also excited about being a microblogger for the conference. This means that my twitter feed will be full of tidbits from presentations and events during the conference. That could include discoveries new to me, like how to pronounce some of t...