Summer Research on Volcanic Megaeruptions

This summer, my students Liz McTaggart and Adam Nordling and I have been working on a spectacular project to try to understand how volcanic megaeruptions are triggered or started. The students and I worked on samples from the first Yellowstone megaeruption (the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff) here at JMU using our FTIR spectrometer, then we went to the Smithsonian Institution to use their mapping FTIR spectrometer. The students then went to eastern California to Long Valley / the Bishop Tuff- another megaeruption- and did a week of field work with scientists from the University of Oregon and Victoria University (New Zealand). They learned how to identify different ash fall layers and pyroclastic flows in the field.