My Travels
I love to travel! I’ve been to many different countries, and nearly every U.S. state. I love going to different places and seeing the world! Some of my favorite vacations were combined with fieldwork, often unintentionally. An example of this is when I went to White Sands, New Mexico. I went there to study the dunes, and I went sledding on the sand. Alamogordo, the closest town to where White Sands is located, is a town devoted to astronomy! This is where the New Mexico Museum of Space History is located (and I highly recommend it for all ages). I also went to the solar observatory nearby in Sunspot, NM. You can’t tell from their websites just how different the observatories I’ve been to are, but they really are distinct!
Here are photographs I took of the gypsum dunes at White Sands:
Another one of my favorite trips was to the Arkansas Crater of Diamonds. It’s pretty much what it sounds like: a crater with diamonds in Arkansas. The Crater of Diamonds is the only place in the world open to the public to find diamonds. It’s not an impact crater, it’s a diatreme. That’s volcanic crater formed by an explosion from a buildup of gas. The explosion helped to bring diamonds to the surface. I identified the rocks in the crater as lamproite, and I found some beautiful butterscotch colored jasper. I also found some quartz fragments, and volcanic tuff. I expect the moon looks a bit similar to the crater, with the gray volcanic rocks and tuff. I didn’t find any diamonds, unfortunately. The area around the crater was a very pretty and humid forest environment though, so only the crater itself is at all like something found somewhere other than Earth.
Here are a couple of photographs from when I went rock collecting there:
I went to Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument just recently. I needed to see a volcano in order to compare and contrast with Io and Martian volcanoes like Olympus Mons. Most of my work is with Mars, but I’ve been doing research for some probes like Cassini and New Horizons, too. Some of the things I found showed me that Sunset Crater is not like Olympus Mons, since Sunset Crater is a cinder cone and Olympus Mons is a shield volcano. I climbed to the top of Lenox Crater, a cinder cone right next to Sunset Crater (which you’re not allowed to climb). It was a bit tricky, especially since rocks kept getting in my shoes. It seemed a bit strange to me that there are volcanoes in Arizona, but I figured out the answer. It’s a hot spot! There are no tectonic boundaries in AZ, but mantle plumes can happen anywhere. That’s something I study with other planets, too: I find something which seems strange and I figure out what caused it. It’s like a mystery! Exogeology ROCKS!
Here are a couple of photographs I took at Sunset Crater:
I just plain like traveling, and pretty much anywhere I go I can find something that ROCKS! I take little trips around the state, like to Sunset Crater, all the time. I enjoy visiting (and using) observatories, seeing geologic formations, and going to places that are completely non-exogeology related. Be sure to look at the Telescopes and Observatories page written by Zoë to see some of the telescopes I’ve used. I want to see all the most varied and interesting places I can! But I always go back to Arizona. I love it here. Besides, what better place could there be for doing what I love? Geology and astronomy both seem to lead me all over the globe, but the best place is back home in Arizona. It works out well for me!
