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 My first AGU Fall Meeting was so full of wonderful science - emergency management exchanges with Colombia to address hazards of lahars (Nevado del Ruiz), volcanic lightning, active monitoring of volcanoes, community preparedness, and all aspects of volcanic activity above, on, and below the surface. I had great conversations with people excited by their work and eager to communicate their work with the AGU masses. One of the many posters that caught my attention was " Don't forget Kilauea: Explosive Hazards at an Ocean Island Basaltic Volcano " by USGS volcanologist Don Swanson. When I talk to people about volcanology the first thing to come up is usually how cool it must be to study lava flows at Hawaii. Well, I don't study effusive lava flows, I am on the explosive end of the spectrum with dome collapse block and ash flows, and I have not yet visited Hawaii. One thing is obvious, many people I talk to think of the relatively safe (with exceptions) pahoe...