The Ant Hill Advantage
-Alison So for the last two weeks both Janine and I have been off on separate field adventures. This is not uncommon for geologists in the summer. School ends and we dash off for locations with rocks we cannot get at home. I plan on doing a longer post on the cool things I observed about the insides of old eroded volcanoes soon, but not just yet as the travels are not done! Ant hill made up of volcanic minerals from the Hopi Buttes Volcanic Field, Navajo Nation, AZ, USA. I did want to share a fun factoid about how ants help geologists when searching for specific rock types by using some examples from my recent field work. Whether or not you had an ant farm as a kid, its pretty easy to imagine the process involved in building an ant colony. The ants excavate tunnels underground and move the material from their tunnels to the surface. This material, moved grain by grain, adds up and can form a hill. As the ant colony gets larger, they bring up material from deeper undergro...