In the Company of Volcanoes

- Janine Krippner I am in the Canary Islands working on the 2021 La Palma eruption, specifically how it impacted the local communities and thinking about how we can help during these events in the future. While on the island of Tenerife between field work in La Palma, there has been some deep seismic activity pretty much below our feet. Learning from the experiences of La Palma, and communication efforts during eruptions in the past, my colleagues and I are getting information out immediately to help people to understand what is going on now, increase awareness and understanding for future eruptions, and help identify the official sources of information. We want to drive the open flow of information to empower people with knowledge moving forward. The release below is being shared across platforms and will be updated on social media and the GeoTenerife website as we move forward. This deep, small magnitude seismicity might not lead to anything this week or month, but this volcanic isla...

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 For many people the idea of making a map seems outdated.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...

- Dr. Janine Krippner How many times are women told 'family or career' ? How many times have we heard about women being treated differently because they have, or want to have, a family? We have heard that it's even a career killer . If we have kids - your career will suffer. Your kids will suffer . You will basically fail at everything . This is the message I have seen over and over again. I have a couple of issues with this. Firstly - I see women succeed at both. Secondly - I see plenty of Dads raising kids and having a career too! The old saying is that 'it takes a village to raise a child', so why do we have the stigma that women are the only ones affected by raising kids, and that it poorly affects their work? When I started discussing putting this post together I got the reply: "I know :(  I have a brilliant chemist friend & she was in tears when she told me she won't pursue a future in academia as she wants children". We need to start...