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...

- 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 It seems obvious to say volcanoes are big, but as with anything in geology size is not immediately obvious. Volcanoes can loom over a landscape, spread ash over large chunks of the planet and even influence our climate- that all sounds big. On the scale of an individual human any eruption is big. They are frequently faster than, slower than (yes both), hotter than and physically larger than a human being. One of the exercises I use when teaching volcanology is focused on understanding just how big, "big" is. We go about this by finding things that we already understand the size and compare them to volcanoes. Like many natural processes (and humans), volcanoes and volcanic eruptions come in all shapes and sizes. If volcanoes only had one size and style of eruption our job studying them and anticipating future eruptions would be much easier. The only human-sized volcano I have ever seen. It was a volcano costume in Kagoshima Japan in 2013. We need to be able...