I have always been interested in earth sciences
because I spent a lot of time outside as a
child growing up.
I think just wanting to know and observing
the outdoors, watching the clouds wanting
to know the types of clouds and why they change,
we would go to places in the mountains, feeling
the great forces that were evident in these
massive structures and the activity.
My specific research interests have varied
with time and as the field has progressed
as well, and I say that I started off in a
more traditional way to understand ocean basins
and information of new oceanic lithosphere
and seafloor spreading processes.
We were trying to understand what happened,
strip off one hundred eighty million years
of Earth’s history to try and understand
that old process where I have seen the power
of trying to understand active process.
That is what motivated me to start looking
at faulting processes and magmatism in our
interplay in East Africa where the processes
are not going and with the Afar Depression
of Ethiopia, it is one of the only places
on Earth’s surface where we can watch the
process, up plate rupture, as it is occurring
right now.
One of the reasons we would like to understand
the process and one of the reasons we choose
Sierra Negra volcano, it is a particular type
of volcano that is not explosive but it is
representative of a large class of volcanos.
It is called a shield volcano, it is broad
and flat, it is an area where there is a high
magma volume.
Once we start talking about say, an ocean
island, we realize then that there may be
a population on that island.
They cannot run away very easily from an eruption
on the island, nor can they live without water,
and the freshwater systems are going to be
linked to the volcanism as well.
Understanding the underground magmatic system
has a societal relevance for the hazard reasons,
and it also is critical to understanding the
flux of material from Earth’s mantle to
the surface over time and how we modify and
create the continents.
Another aspect of volcanic islands is the
potential hazard to far flung communities
from that collapse of the volcano, so understanding
the internal structure of the volcano is and
how the layers build up and where the magma
occurs helps us to understand where potential
weaknesses could be and allows us to better
predict tsunamis or hazards in these regions.
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