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On January 3 I
flew to Guatemala for my first field season. I was joined by many of
my colleagues, my advisor Matt and my other committee members, Bill and
Gregg, as well as, several students, Lizzette Roriguez, Janelle Byman, Elly Bunzendahl and Oto Matias. We awoke to
an amazing view of Pacaya Volcano from our hotel
window. You can see pictures from this trip here. I was part of
the COSPEC team, whose job it was to measure the SO2 flux at
each of the volcanoes we visited and to process data in the field in order
to assist local government agencies.
Our first volcanoes were Pacaya and
Fuego, which were actively degassing at an
average rate of ~1500 and ~250 tons/day, respectively. Several
scientists joined us at these volcanoes, including Simon Carn from the University of Maryland - Baltimore, Andy
Harris and Luke Flynn from University of Hawaii, and Mark Davies. We
spent the first few days at Pacaya and Fuego and then headed to Santiaguito
Volcano. Here, I was given a great opportunity to learn how to use an
infrared themal monitor that had been developed
by Andy Harris. I spent the first day at Santiaguito
with Andy and Luke, learning how to set up and use the equipment and
watching this amazing volcano. This volcano seemed perfect for my
research. It erupted approximately every 40 minutes and was producing
about 300 tons/day of SO2. We only spent a few days here,
but I learned a lot from Andy and was excited by the potentials of thermal
monitoring. We returned to Pacaya and
remained there for another week. During this week, I finally
convinced Matt that he was my choice for advisor and we began to discuss my
project in more depth. When I mentioned my interest in the themal monitoring, he suggested that Andy be my outside
committee member. Within the week, he had talked to Andy and I now
have my committee complete.
On the 23rd of January, Bill, Matt, Lizzette,
and I left Guatemala and flew to El Salvador where we met up with another
student, Demetrio Escobar. We studied two
volcanoes in El Salvador: Santa Ana and San Miguel, which were both
actively degassing, and were joined by Alan Bernard, a volcanologist
from Belgium. Here we continued to measure SO2 with the
COSPEC, but I had also brought along Andy's infrared thermal monitor and it
became my job to set it up at each volcano. We spent a week studying
these two volcanoes.
Finally, on January 31, Bill, Matt, Lizzette
and I flew to Nicaragua, where we took measurements at Masaya
and San Cristobal and took field trips to Cerro
Negro, Telica, and several other non-active
volcanoes. Masaya and San Cristobal were both actively degassing, unfortunately,
at this point we no longer had a COSPEC for measurements. So we
measured the thermals and the plume particle size (with a sun photometer).
We were joined at Masaya by scientists from Open
University (Glyn Williams-Jones and Nico Fournier) and a student from McGill University
(Ben Kennedy). The final week found Lizzette
and I the only ones at Masaya
until our final two field days. At this time, the Open group
returned, including Dave Rothery. Also,
Andy Harris, Luke Flynn, Pete McGinnis-Mark and Keith Horton from
University of Hawaii. Andy and I discussed the data that I'd been
collecting and he suggested that I come to Hawaii to do research for a few
months.
So, I have just applied for the Kleinman
Award grant in hopes of using it to go to Hawaii next spring for two
months. And, I have processed the data for Santiaguito
and hope to produce a paper from the results. I am also processing
the thermal data from Masaya in hopes of getting
a paper from that as well. I have plenty of work to keep me busy
throughout the next few months.
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