This blog is no longer regularly maintained and information in some posts may be outdated. Please do your research, especially if visiting field locations, as rules, regulations, and access may have changed in the time since the posts were originally published. The post Please Note! appeared first on Magma Cum Laude ..read more

Last week, in a moment of random thought, I suggested reviving our beloved Where On Google Earth (#WOGE). @i_rockhopper got to work right away restarting the contest, and I tracked down the image, thus earning myself the right to host the next and an hour of handicap according to the Schott Rule. (See below for the details of that rule, which keeps all us old-timers from dominating the contest.) Here’s your next challenge in this geoscience reverse image search! (Click to embiggen.) Where On Google Earth #603. This one makes me chuckle; it’s very Thor’s Hammer-esque. Comment on this post or ..read more

It’s been a rough week for New Zealanders, particularly those affected by the Whakaari/White Island eruption and those responding to it. I’d like to strongly urge anyone in the media to please defer your questions to the NZ experts when at all possible – and be patient with them. Tragic events like these also have a profound impact on the people who study and work at volcanoes, and they will be hurting as well as extremely busy. A Kiwi friend was kind enough to compile these resources for me and anyone who can use them: Geonet Update #3 (Tuesday 10 December) Since this morning, the seismic ..read more

A portion of the 1797 map of the La Perouse expedition, in which a “Volcan” is placed on Cape Mendocino (noticeably rather far away from Mount Shasta’s actual location to the east and north.) Map courtesy of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. Recently, as chronicled in Scientific American, I was involved with amending the eruptive record at California’s Mount Shasta to remove an eruption that was supposedly seen by a French mapping expedition in 1786. USGS researchers had already been puzzling over it for years – evidence was slim, since the area was already prone to forest fires an ..read more

Photo courtesy of Kyle Anderson, USGS I’ve delayed writing about my involvement in last summer’s Kilauea eruption for a number of reasons. One is because I wanted to wait until the USGS has had a chance to publish the preliminaries of the eruption; others are more personal, involving my experience working with the communities affected and the people responding to the eruption. But now that the one-year anniversary of the start of the eruption has come around, I feel like a little self-reflection is warranted. A volcanic crisis of any kind can be a harrowing experience, but being a science comm ..read more