Hello all! Finally sitting down to do my blog.  I did a couple of volunteer stints at two different sessions, the first being the Volcanology session Monday morning, and the second being the Engineering Geology session Tuesday morning.  Both sessions had talks about a recently discovered landslide in south central Utah that's bigger than the state of Rhode Island! It's called the Markagunt Gravity Slide and it occurred roughly 22 million years ago in volcanic deposits.  They found another landslide nearby called the Sevier landslide.

Sunday I attended several talks on mining, including on on the characterization of abandoned uranium mines in New Mexico. They were trying to develop a quick and inexpensive procedure to inventory and categorize legacy mines in New Mexico.  Another mining talk was titled Mining, the Environment, and Health and it went through several case studies, the most interesting of which was one from 2010 in northwest Nigeria, where villagers were artisanally processing silver ore by using flour mills to grind the ore and their grain, resulting in serious lead poisoning. Around 700 children younger than five were killed from lead poisoning and thousands more were permanently disabled. The soil was highly contaminated, and the lead carbonate in the ore was highly bioaccessible, meaning it was easily absorbed by the body.  Unfortunately even the unground grain was contaminated by mercury and lead!

Sunday I also went to a couple of volcanology talks in the session dedicated to Don Swanson (who was awarded the MGPV's Career Geologist award Tuesday evening for his lifetime of work on Hawaii and the Cascade Range volcanoes).  The first talk was titled Milestones on the Road to Eruption Prediction, and discussed current methods of volcano monitoring before moving to lava dome observations at Mt. Saint Helens. Observations and monitoring helped the Cascade Volcano Observatory successfully predict eruptions of Mt. Saint Helens with no false alarms throughout the 1980s. There are several volcano databases and volcanologists are stepping outside their expertise and doing more interdisciplinary work, working to develop new hazard maps.

The Volcanology session on Monday morning was perhaps the most interesting session, with multiple talks on mechanisms and collapse.  The most interesting talk was the very first one, given by the year's Arthur L. Day medalist Donald Dingwell. It was titled Experimental Volcanology: Accessing the Inaccessible.  In his talk Dr. Dingwell spoke of his eruption experiments at the University of Munich in Germany.  There were several amazing slow-motion videos, which may have been the coolest part, because he had a video of when they managed to reproduce volcanic lightning in the lab!  Dr. Dingwell's experiments focused on making volcanic ash, capturing the ash, and analyzing the ash. His experiments have shown that you can make ash just by decompression. There were a couple of papers he cited that I need to look into, including one on volcanic lightning.

Tuesday morning was the Engineering Geology session. There were several talks specific to geohazards, including a talk on a new rock classification number, which is a new system proposed to remove some of the subjectiveness and discrepancy when used by personnel with varied experience. This system is more for use when building and maintaining structures. Other talks involved natural disasters, including an investigation of the 2013 Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park, and a new investigation into the causes of the 1889 Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania.

Tuesday afternoon I attended several more talks focused on landslides. The more interesting one was on the Kumamoto, Japan earthquake in April 2016.  There were many landslides in the hilly and forested region, and they were a strange shape in the grasslands, more rectangular than teardrop shaped. The soils there were relatively dry which affected the shape and runout distance. Slides were initiated along ridgelines and convex slopes. In the forests, slides were on steeper slopes and more elongated.

The last talk I attended was on Wednesday afternoon on landslides in national parks.  They're putting together a system to monitor slope geohazards in the national parks. Denali National Park is the test for these management programs, having rated all of their slopes. They're even putting together a "new slope event form" for citizens to inform the park service about new hazards observed. Perhaps the coolest thing mentioned in this talk was that they put in a device to measure the movement of the crack running the length of North Window in Arches National Park. This device was able to track even the daily movement of the crack caused by expansion and contraction of the rock!

Overall I had a great time at GSA 2016 and am thankful for the ability to go!

Sarah