What do you do?
I study processes within magma reservoirs – the magmatic plumbing system beneath volcanoes – and in particular, the rates of processes such as crystal growth, magma storage, chemical evolution of magmas, and loss of volcanic gases from the melt. Crystals that grow from magmas can act as tiny recorders of the chemical changes that happen in a magma, so through chemical analyses of the crystals we can extract information about what was happening in the reservoir while they were growing.

Why should the general public be interested in what you do?
Most people are aware that eruptions dramatically affect the local area around a volcano, but some types of eruptions also have far-reaching effects -- for example, they can present a hazard to air traffic hundreds of kilometers away from the volcano, and they can even affect global climate for years after eruptions. As global population grows, more and more people are living near volcanoes, and we need to understand how volcanoes work in order to understand which volcanoes are most dangerous, and which hazards are most likely at a given volcano. My research ties into this because in order to predict what volcanoes will do in the future, we need to know not only what they did in the past but also how long it took them to do it.

Why does it interest you?
Who can resist the lure of volcanoes – especially after seeing lava flow before your eyes? After spending a summer as an intern at the Hawaii Volcano Observatory, I was hooked (it just took me a few years to realize that my interest was scientific as well as aesthetic…). Beyond their aesthetic appeal and the motivation to understand volcanic hazards in order to minimize death and destruction, volcanoes are interesting scientifically because they can tell us a lot about the way the Earth works. For one thing, magmas are the main mechanism of transferring material from the interior of the Earth to the crust, and therefore are big players in crustal growth and chemical exchange between the crust and deep Earth over geologic time. Also, because the bulk of the Earth’s interior is inaccessible, it can be sampled only indirectly, and one of our few sources of information about the deep Earth is the chemistry of magmas that are generated there. But this is complicated by the fact that any magmas that are erupted at the surface must have passed through (and to some extent interacted with) the crust. Therefore, understanding the processes by which magmas interact with and evolve within the crust is important both from the perspective of understanding the origins of diverse magma compositions and their associated hazards, and from the perspective of recognizing geochemical signatures in magmas that are telling us something about global convection and other processes deep within the Earth.

What major advances/discoveries have occurred in your research field over the last 10 years?
Recent analytical advances have made it possible to measure subtle variations in the chemical composition of different crystal populations within a magma or even chemical variations within individual crystals in a single magma. As a result, there is a growing recognition that crystals that we see in lavas may be only partially related to the magma that brought them to the surface. Instead, they often record a complex history of crystal growth and storage in different magmas and/or isolated environments within a given reservoir. The advantage of this complexity is that by studying the crystals, we have access to part of the magma’s history that is lost when you look at the chemical composition of the rock as a whole. By combining this crystal-chemical information with ages of the crystals, we can now develop a much more complete picture of what was going on beneath these volcanoes. Over the last 10 years, our picture of volcanic reservoir processes has changed dramatically due to this crystal-scale information – and the next 10 years promises to bring at least as many new discoveries.