A new semester

For me, this means some welcome changes. As a result of earning an NSF Graduate Fellowship, I don't have to TA this year, so I actually have more time to sit down and work on my own research (instead of spending a lot of time - including whole weekends at one point - just keeping up with grading). This also means that my committee has been encouraging me to take advantage of said funding and go for a PhD, but more on that later.

One interesting thing that happened to me last week was that I was asked to be a group leader in UB's training conference for TAs. This is a two-day gathering in which TAs, new or otherwise, meet to learn about teaching techniques, how to handle a classroom, academic honesty/dishonesty, etc. For new TAs, it might be the only chance they get to acquire a little classroom training before they find themselves in charge of a classroom (something that I wrote about last year around this time). I still find this ridiculous; just because you've made it to graduate school doesn't mean you're qualified to teach, although there are certainly a lot of great TAs out there who manage just fine.

Another unsatisfying aspect about the conference is that it wasn't geared toward science students. In fact, most of the bigger science departments at UB hold their own version of the conference, which I think would be much more useful. Fortunately, the geology department is moving toward that idea. I think a hybrid, where we invite some of the speakers from the regular conference to come and present, as well as having current geology TAs and professors work with incoming grads, would work well.

There were aspects of the conference that worked well, though. At the end of the final day, groups meet to hold micro-teaching sessions where each person gives a five-minute lesson on a topic of their choice. It doesn't need to be in their discipline; I've seen people teach their groups about how to shave, how to brew beer, how to decipher binary, and the best way to catch and eradicate an invasive saltwater fish. The catch is that these presentations are taped, and everyone gets to watch themselves (and their groupmates), and critique each other. Because it's hard to see yourself when you're in front of a class, you get the benefit of evaluating your own performance, and you get constructive criticism from your peers. (Inevitably everyone cringes to see themselves on tape - even me - but they also usually say that the micro-teaching is the most helpful part of the conference.)

So in the end, there rae good and bad things about the TA conference. For new TAs, like I was last year, it's a bit of a lifeline - maybe the only chance they'll have to learn how to teach before they're responsible for their own classroom. For returning TAs, it can be a reminder of things that they've forgotten in the grind of trying to get everything done, cover the whole lab book, grade all the papers. But as I mentioned, treating all the conference-goers as if they're automatically going to be in the position of professors isn't as helpful to TAs who are mainly going to be running labs or recitation sections, especially if their department doesn't yet have their own training session.

I am curious about what other people have experienced, though. Is this a common thing at other schools? Did any of you get special training before you found yourself in front of a classroom, or did you wing it and hope for the best? What advice would you give to incoming TAs? (If I get enough responses, I'd like to do another post on tips for TAs - so please comment!)

Volcano "spiders"

Most of us hate the thought of an infestation, but in the case of volcano-monitoring 'spiders', it's a safe way to gather information about active volcanoes. A number of recent articles have been talking about a new NASA program to drop instrument-loaded tripods on Mount St. Helens, putting monitoring equipment in areas that are dangerous for scientists to visit or just plain inaccessible. (See additional coverage on the Volcanism Blog, National Geographic News, and Geology News, and a photo of one of the new NASA instruments above.)

Many of you will remember "Spiderlegs" from the movie Dante's Peak, which was a shining example of a waste of money - at least the way the scientists in the movie were using it. Trying to get a robot to climb over piles of shifting, jagged rocks is pretty hard, and if it keeps breaking while you're trying to use it, it's not worth the effort of dragging the thing to the top of a mountain. (I also suspect that NASA truly would not have appreciated Spiderlegs being kicked around - literally - during the repair process.)

As it turns out, however malfunctional their creation was on film, the moviemakers were working from reality - both NASA and the USGS have been using various 'spider' incarnations to monitor volcanoes for more than a decade. NASA tested two robots (Dante I and II, in 1992 and 1994, respectively) in volcanic craters which were real life versions of the Spiderlegs that showed up in the 1996 movie. Both were tethered robots which descended into volcanic craters - Mt. Erebus in Antarctica for Dante I, and Mt. Spur for Dante II (seen at left) - with varying success. According to the 1994 article on NASA's website, the robots were a joint effort on the part of NASA, Carnegie Mellon, and the Alaska Volcano Observatory. The article also says that

"NASA's goals with this project were to test and demonstrate robot exploration, communications and computer technologies which may be needed for future space exploration missions. Carnegie Mellon's interests include extending the results of this demonstration to other more practical Earth-based applications, including additional volcanic exploration, mining and mine safety operations, large-scale agricultural deployment and hazardous environment operations for industrial and municipal organizations. The Alaskan Volcano Observatory's goal is to obtain information on the chemical and temperature properties of the crater floor, and a higher resolution video survey map of the crater interior."

The first deployment of a 'spider' on Mount St. Helens was in 2004 (see more images at the CVO's website). These spiders were a nonmobile but portable bundle of instruments - GPS, seismic, etc. - that can't be installed permanently because of the terrain or conditions. They're relatively expendable, which more expensive instruments and scientists are not, and they function without human oversight.

The first helicopter deployment of an early spider in October 2004 (CVO Photo Archives).

A "tilt-leg" spider on the north face of the Mount St. Helens lava dome in January 2005. (CVO Photo Archives)

The early spiders only consisted of one or two instruments apiece, but new models have multiple sensors (and have spiffy software that can sort out what's important enough to send on to scientists). According to NASA's website,

A team of engineers, students, volcanologists and geologists put the system together. The team includes the U.S. Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano Observatory staff, who designed and built the "spider" hardware; Washington State University in Vancouver, where the sensor network software was written; and NASA, which developed software to make the spiders able to detect events to trigger space observations by the EO-1 satellite.

All in all, exciting new stuff - and a big improvement from the poor ungainly contraption that Pierce Brosnan was trying to coax down a bouldery slope on an imaginary volcano.

Degassing structures in pyroclastic deposits

One of my favorite features of the pyroclastic deposits that I saw in Italy were degassing structures. A good field description of these features would be "fines-depleted pipes", since it doesn't make any assumptions about their origins (something to be avoided in the description section of your field notes!)

Branching degassing structures in a pyroclastic deposit in the Colli Albani (Alban Hills) volcanic district. (The ruler is divided into ten-cm sections.)

These pipes are formed when gases trapped in freshly-deposited pyroclastic material rise to the surface of the deposit as overlying material settles and compacts. The gases usually take fines (ash and small lapilli) with them, leaving behind tubes where clast size is larger than the surrounding deposit, and forming fumaroles on the surface of the pyroclastic deposit. The pipes can branch and join, and the ones I've seen range in size from a centimeter or two across to almost half a meter.

Fines-depleted structures galore! The side of the same cliff in the Alban Hills, with geologist headgear for scale.

An annotated version of the last photo, with the outlines of some of the degassing structures and the top of the pyroclastic deposit (overlain by some paleosols and modern soils).

If you look closely at a degassing pipe, you will often see that the clast size gets larger and the abundance of clasts (rather than ash and other fine material) increases as you move toward the edge of the pipe. This is an important clue to the processes going on in the structure; the interpretation here is that gases get concentrated around the edge of a pipe, and blow out more of the fine material there than in the middle.

Detail of the first photo; you can see a strip of scoria and other clasts along the right side of the degassing pipe, and more fine material toward the center.

It kind of brings to mind a push-up popsicle: the melted sherbert oozes up around the edges of the cardboard tube while the stuff in the middle more or less stays put.

(There should really be some oozing in this one to illustrate my point better, but apparently Fred Flintstone only gets excited about non-drippy desserts.)

One of the neatest things about these features is that you can tell something about the emplacement of the deposit. If the degassing pipe cuts through the entire deposit, it's a good bet that the deposit was emplaced all at once, whether as a single unit or through an episode of progressive aggradation. If there are multiple pipes that terminate on different levels of a layered deposit, the layers must represent different episodes in the eruption.

A degassing structure in pyroclastic deposits on Procida Island, near the Bay of Naples. Notice how the bottom of the pipe (which curves around the large central clast) seems to cut off at a layer of cobble sized rocks about a meter and a half above the cliff base. Contemplative volcanologist for scale.

Fines-depleted pipes are an easy way to identify a pyroclastic deposit, and can be a good distinguishing feature if you're trying to tell apart tuffs and lavas (providing there hasn't been so much welding and compaction that the degassing structures are obliterated). Another great example of this is the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, an area in Katmai National Park and Preserve (Alaska) that was filled by ash flows from the 1912 eruption of Novarupta.

Southeast up the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, with the rim of Katmai Caldera on the left skyline. Photo by R. McGimsey, June 10, 1991; from the USGS Photo Library.

The ash filled the valley to a depth of 200 meters, and both gases trapped in the ash from the eruption and water vapor from buried streams formed thousands of fumaroles on the deposit's surface. (These are no longer active, but still visible on the new valley floor.)

Italy (Part II)

...and the rest of my favorite Italian photos.

The Valle del Bove on Mount Etna, with the current lava flows steaming at the summit (upper left of the photo; click to see it larger!)


Dikes in the Valle del Bove on Mount Etna.


A cinder cone (maybe two?) on Etna's south flank that was active during the 2001 eruption, with a channelized a'a lava flow at its base.

A Norman castle in the town of Aci Castello, Sicily. (This was a coolness overload for me; not only is it an 11th century castle, which makes the archaeologist in me drool, it's built on pillow lavas. How's that for geoarchaeology?)


Hydromagmatic deposits and dune structures on the island of Procida, just outside the Bay of Naples. These were chock-full of accretionary lapilli (which unfortunately disintegrated on the trip home).


The neatest spot on Procida, even if there was a lot of trash around - an angular contact between hydromagmatic deposits and the welded layer underlying fines-depleted breccias. The breccias were amazing - huge chunks of pumice, trachytes, obsidian, scoria, all packed together with almost no matrix, and grading into a "typical" ignimbrite. (Volcanologists don't understand a lot about how these are emplaced, but one of the PhD students in my department is working on it for her dissertation.)


The summit crater at Vesuvius, minus the dozen or so souvenir stands.


The Roman city of Hercolano (Herculanium), with Vesuvius in the background. We were lucky that there was almost no one visiting, unlike Pompeii (which I'll have to see another time). It was beastly hot, though.


A street in Herculaneum. You can actually still see all the charred roof beams and window frames - it's almost a little creepy, when you realize that people not only lived here, they died here.


Part of a map painted by Ignazio Danti in the Vatican Museum, showing the Aeolian islands from a 16th-century point of view. Looks like Vulcano and "Strongoli" were both active at the time!


And one of my favorite discoveries on the whole trip...the Pope's rock hammer. He's a closet geologist!*



*Okay, so it was a commemorative builder's hammer from the construction of some ostentatious overly-decorated edifice somewhere. I bet it would make a pretty decent fossil chipper, too.

Italy (Part I)

I'm finally in one place for a couple of weeks this summer, and that means it's time to start posting photos while I delay writing real blog entries. (There's some cool stuff I saw on both my Italy and Utah trips that I definitely want to discuss, but my brain is still adjusting to the DC-area sauna, so they'll have to wait until I"m feeling more creative.)

Anyway, here are a few of the best photos from my trip to Italy in June. (I've also discovered that, while the heat and humidity are nasty in Italy in June, they're nothing like the heat and humidity we have around DC at the same time. I can't speak for August, though.)

Some of the beautiful marbles used to decorate the Vatican (which is, by the way, big and elaborate and overdecorated enough to make your head explode). A lot of the churches in Rome look like this, but the Vatican takes the cake. (This is the tomb of one of the Pope Alexanders, but I was too distracted by the inlay to notice which.)


A medieval street in Rome near the Vatican. All those cobblestones are basalt!


The first Roman mile marker on the Via Appia (which is not only made of basalt, but built on a lava flow).


Ruts in Via Appia basalt.


The amphitheater at Sutri, which is excavated out of volcanic tuff (and right next to even older Etruscan tombs that were dug out of the same unit).


Probably the most spectacular columnar jointing I've ever seen in my life, in a Vulsini District trachyte. (The bush at the top of the cliff is roughly four meters tall.)
The pines of Rome and part of the Palantine Hill. This explains why Pliny the Younger's comparison of eruption columns to pine trees always confused me - Roman pines don't look like American ones!


The Fossa cone on Vulcano. Vulcano is a lovely island, but not if you can't stand the smell of sulfur vents!


Strombolicchio, a volcanic neck off the coast of Stromboli, where an early calc-alkaline volcanic center existed about 200 ka.


One obligatory cute cat photo from a bookstore on Stromboli.


And an obligatory Strombolian eruption photo. If you look closely through the spatter, you can see the lights of the boats watching from about 850 meters below. (Next time, I'm parking myself on a boat for the light show - much more relaxing than the climb!)

When do I get to go?

A proper geologist's photo, with foot for scale. (According to NASA's Apollo 11 Image Library, "Second photo of Buzz's second soil-mechanics bootprint.") I like this one almost as much as the iconic solo bootprint.

I haven't spent much time today listening to interviews or news reports about the anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, but I did get a chance to watch For All Mankind (1989), which just showed on Turner Classic Movies. And even though it was a movie, and edited for dramatic effect and impact, it really floored me.

I'm too young to have experienced any of the age of the Apollo missions firsthand, but watching the videos and listening to the astronauts who were walking on another world is really humbling. As a geologist I've had the craving to go there myself, every once in a while; and as a human, I can understand what the astronauts were talking about when they said that mankind was meant to explore, no matter where. One thing that really struck me was one of the Apollo 17 astronauts saying that, even though the Moon was so far from Earth and home, and should have been totally alien, it felt like home, familiar.

I wonder, if I ever had the chance to visit, whether it would feel the same to me. Maybe the geology would make it feel that way - there are volcanoes on the Moon, after all. The video from the Apollo 17 mission showed the astronauts collecting rock samples - and they were having a wonderful time of it, joking and clowning just like we all do in the field. But to do that on the Moon!

It's hard not to look at it romantically, especially since I grew up watching From the Earth to the Moon and The Right Stuff. And it's a pity that we probably won't go back there anytime soon, if we decide to focus on Mars. But I honestly can't understand how people can see those photos and videos and listen to the men who've been there, and still say that it's wasteful and unnecessary to want to go back. How could anyone say that when we've barely even taken a few steps toward exploring it? That's an attitude I'll never comprehend.

I'm glad that there were people who dedicated their lives to sending humans to the Moon, and that there still are. And as a geologist, I'd like to think I share a little bit of their drive to explore and discover new things - even if I never get to leave the Earth. (And there's still a lot of Earth to see...)

A geology geek to the core (Accretionary Wedge #18)

Sitting here in Zion National Park, one of the last spots I visited on my first geology field course, I feel like I'm coming full circle to some of the reasons that I'm still doing geology. (I also feel like I could receive wifi through my teeth. Twenty plus wifi points? Really?) Anyway, it's a perfect chance for me to answer Volcanista's question:

So July’s topic is about your inspiration to enter geosciences. Was it a fantastic mentor? Watching your geologist parents growing up? A great teacher, or an exciting intro field trip? How did it happen?

I first became interested in geology as a little kid - that rock and dinosaur phase that so many of us go through. Fortunately, living in the DC area meant that I could go see the Smithsonian Natural History Museum pretty much any time I wanted to, and I did. I remember my dad lifting me up over the rail so I could pet the fake tyrannosaur skull, and driving the video camera that looked in on the fossil prep lab, and peering at the fluorescent minerals in the gem and mineral exhibit. My parents let me dig giant holes in the backyard, and the one time I found a fossil (a shell mold), I remember asking if the Smithsonian might want it for their collection.

I pretty much knew I wanted to do geology all through primary and secondary school, and especially volcanology. Some Saturdays I would watch tapes of the old Planet Earth series (the one narrated by an Attenborough, not this Sigourney Weaver stuff they redid recently), and I would always skip to the plate tectonics and volcanoes episode. (Yes, I was pretty much an uber-geek from the start.) When I got to high school, the "geosystems" class was mostly meant for non-AP-track students, so I took AP Chemistry and, somehow, found out about a volunteer position at the Smithsonian instead, helping edit the Bulletin of the Global Volcanism Network . Two summers of that and I was hooked on volcanoes for good; I literally couldn't imagine having any career other than geology, and volcanoes were especially fascinating.

When I went looking at colleges, the geology program was a big factor, and I pretty much knew that I was going to go to William & Mary the moment I set foot on campus. When I started classes, I was so excited to be taking intro geology that I sat front and center the whole semester (although the instructor, who was a visiting prof, didn't even recognize me when I met him at GSA a year or so later). I was lucky enough that my freshman advisor turned into my permanent advisor, and that he took a chance on letting me into his Regional Field Geology course with nothing more than Intro and Historical Geology under my belt.

And that's how I ended up in Zion, and a lot of other places on and around the Colorado Plateau, after my freshman year. I didn't know much about minerals, or field mapping, or structures, or petrology, or pretty much anything at the start of that trip - but boy, did I learn. After three and a half weeks in the field I was pretty much hooked for life, even though I spent a good chunk of it being sweaty and tired and sleeping on rocks and generally being upset with my own lack of experience.

I was also hooked on the field work, which turned out to be a good thing - my senior research project, and some mapping I've been helping with the last couple of years, grew out of one stop on that first long field course. My advisor played a huge part (and I've written about it before), and the fact that he pushed me to work hard and take risks is one of the reasons I'm still in the field. It's invaluable to have someone who believes in you, after all. (He's also one of the reasons I became a better writer, and boy, has that paid off!)

I think the moment that I knew without a doubt that I wanted to be a volcanologist was when I scooped a blob of molten rock out of a Kilauea lava flow and watched it cool. My field notes for that hike say "BEST DAY EVER!" even though I know I was tired and hot and had a twisted ankle at the end of the hike. Handling the lava - seeing it up close for the first time - was just addictive, and every time I see a volcano I get the same sort of rush, to varying degrees.

So, I guess my answer is a mixture of things. I feel like to some extent the geology just got hardwired in there, although I have no idea how. But experiences and mentors were a huge part of it as well - and now that I'm in grad school for volcanology, and have even more great mentors to work with, I hope I'll want to stick with it for a long time to come.