In the Company of Volcanoes

-Alison If you are a nature or geology enthusiast and get a chance to go to New Mexico, I promise, you will not be without things to do and see. For many of us New Mexico is also a great place to eat yourself sick on chile (green, red, or both!) and sopapillas, but it is also home to some epic landscapes. I’ve been traveling to NM with my family for decades and we usually found a way to sneak in something scenic: Taos Gorge,   lava tubes, White Sands and more. More recently I’ve been to NM for purely geologic reasons, hitting key volcanic locations like Valles Caldera and Ship Rock . This last November I had the chance to hang out for a few days with a preeminent mapper of New Mexican volcanoes, and his equally impressive geochemist wife. I was there to look at pyroclastic rocks from the last ~1.6 million years and quarries that might let me get some of these rocks (in large quantities) back to New York. My colleagues and I at the University at Buffalo are in th...

-Alison and Janine The largest geoscience conference happens every year in San Francisco. The American Geophysical Union (AGU)  meeting draws more than 20,000 participants from around the world every December. We gather to share our new results, catch up with friends and colleagues, and drink beer. Janine and Alison will both be attending this year. Although we have been to conferences in three other countries together, this will be Janine's first AGU and the first conference in the US where we both be in attendance. Both of us have posters to present on our research, and then will spend the rest of the visit stuffing our brains full of new information and names of new colleagues. If you are going to AGU we'd love you to stop by and chat! Janine and Alison in Japan for the IAVCEI conference in 2013. So what sort of topics get covered in a 20,000 person conference? Way more than we could fit in a blog post, but you can get the idea just from our examples....

- Janine What happens when you get really viscous rhyolite (high silica content which makes it very sticky) magma rising to the surface? Well, it either stops, produces a really big bang, or oozes. When it stops below the surface it forms granite , which we see a lot of nearby in Yosemite . A build up of gasses that produces very high pressures can result in an explosive eruption, like certain eruptions that have occurred in the past at Yellowstone and Long Valley calderas. When the conditions aren't right for an explosive eruption, a more quiet 'oozing' of lava occurs at the surface that creates some really fantastic looking rocks! If you want to see a great example of rocks where you can see how they moved, head over to the Inyo domes volcanic chain near Mammoth mountain in California. The Inyo domes are near the edge of the Long Valley caldera , Yellowstone's less infamous cousin, west of the Mono domes chain. The Inyo chain is a group of rhyolitic domes and fl...

-Alison Experimental volcanology is a pretty fun sounding job description, but it is also one that isn’t as obvious in terms of what that entails. There are a lot of different specialties in volcanology, and the day to day activities for volcanologists can be pretty diverse. You can describe what I do as making deposits from simplified versions of volcanic processes using experiments to understand what evidence is left behind in the rocks. The simplifications mean that I can study the complex phenomena of an explosive eruption in parts, one or two at a time. Then I relate isolated processes to the deposits they form, which I compare to natural deposits that are the result of anywhere between 2 and 10 different processes. Every volcanic rock you see is the result of whatever process gets it out of the ground, some form of transport and then deposition. After that the deposits can be altered through physical processes like erosion by water and wind, chemical bre...