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Recovery Act Funding Goes Towards Earthquake Monitoring
The USGS has spent its stimulus money to upgrade it's monitoring network and hire students.
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Hello! My name is Alexandra and I have just earned my PhD degree from Michigan Technological University, in the Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences. My research was in volcanology and the monitoring of volcanic eruption ash clouds in the upper atmosphere (>10 km) using satellite data. These ash clouds are extremely hazardous to aircraft and can stay in the atmosphere for many days and travel many hundreds of kilometers from their source volcano. So far, there have been no ash cloud-aircraft encounters that have led to a crash. But in one of the most famous cases of an encounter - a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines 747 encountered an ash cloud from Redoubt Volcano, Alaska at 25,000 feet in 1989 - the aircraft lost power to all four engines and the pilots weren't able to restart the engines until they had "glided" out of the ash cloud. The plane was reported to have passed through the 13,000 foot mark before all four engines were restarted. That's a harrowing 12,000 foot descent with no power!!!
Although I enjoy doing research on volcanoes very much, I feel that my true calling is writing. I love writing and I love earth science (hence, the PhD in Geology) so I figured I would love combining the two and at the same time exposing the public to some of the great ongoing research in the natural hazard field that sometimes just stays in the realm of academia and never gets public exposure.
I have just started a wonderful position as the Public Outreach and Education Director for the National Suborbital Education and Research Center (NSERC) at the University of North Dakota. We work very closely with NASA to plan missions that conduct Earth science investigations using suborbital platforms, such as the NASA DC-8.
Suite 101 Editor's Choice award winning articles include:
Satellites See Kasatochi Eruption
Prehistoric Ice Sheets of Africa