In the Company of Volcanoes

-Alison So I will be attending my very first Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) next week 3/20-3/25/2016. It is an annual gathering of folks who study all sorts of awesome things off of Earth. This includes our nearest neighbors like our moon and Mars, but also celestial object further afield, like that rubber ducky shaped comet 67P , and things beyond Pluto in the Kupier belt . I am very excited for this conference because I’ve been hearing about it for years from friends and colleagues, and my attendance means I’ve got enough data that I might be able to say something about another planet. That just blows my mind. Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko images by the European Space Agency's NAVCAM on the Rosetta spacecraft. I am also excited about being a microblogger for the conference. This means that my twitter feed will be full of tidbits from presentations and events during the conference. That could include discoveries new to me, like how to pronounce some of t...

- Dr. Janine Krippner I am excited about an upcoming set of Google Hangout sessions with 6th graders talking all about volcanoes, why they erupt, why some erupt more violently than others, what their hazards are, and what we, as volcanologists, are doing to try and help people that live near them. So I sent out a request to the world of Twitter and volcanologists (links to their twitter feeds included, also full of information and resources - many more twitter volcanologists can be found) from around the world got back to me with great ideas and resources, and here they are! This is an open blog, I will add more resources as they come to my attention, so if there is something missing please contact me and I will add it for everyone to enjoy. Volcanologist @kenhrubin has put together a list of Twitter volcanologists, volcano watchers, and volcano-related organizations so you can keep an eye on the latest activity and volcano news. You can watch the list Here . This looks like a...

- 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...

- 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...