In the Company of Volcanoes

-Alison Most of my research can be described as looking at rocks to figure out what happened in the past.  There are many deposits from volcanic eruptions that don't just contain rocks. As volcanic soils are very fertile, many volcanoes are forested which means that falling ash or debris flows interact with trees and other plants. The way trees are damaged by the eruption can tell us a lot about what happened. The trees in the blast zone of Mount St. Helens are a dramatic example. Trees blown down by the 1980 later blast at Mt St Helens (image from 2015). I was recently lucky enough to visit Calbuco Volcano in the lake region of Chile. You may remember the impressive pictures of Calbuco erupting at sunset on April 22, 2015.  This heavily forested stratovolcano produced a large plume (which dropped tephra, coarse scoria on the slopes of the volcano and ash all over eastern Chile and Argentina), pyroclastic flows, and lahars (debris flows) from melting gla...

- Janine and Alison This morning I (Janine) was researching the May 18, 1980 Mount Saint Helens eruption to begin the next phase of my research. Reading through the descriptions of the start of the eruption - when massive blocks of the volcano slid to the north, I enthusiastically jumped out of my chair surprising my office mates. Marking out 1 meter with my feet I looked up at them and told them "this is one meter, now imagine 50 of these. Now imagine a massive chunk of rock moving 50 of these in one second! 50 m per second! This is nuts!" The joys of sharing an office with an over-enthusiastic volcanologist... 50 m/s is how fast the side of the mountain began to travel down and away from the volcano, taking chunks of rock the size of 30 story buildings northward. As the slide evolved into a debris avalanche, the sediment mass began flowing, the blocks reached speeds of up to 80 m/s [1]. So this got us talking about the insane speeds involved in volc...

-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 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...