Kilauea, Hawaii

To round things out, just this last spring I went out to Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii and got to poke some lava flows, along with checking out the ocean entry at the ever-erupting volcano. I'm lucky that as a geologist, my job entails traveling around the planet to see these visits (from the ground) and find out how volcanoes behaving similarly and differently. Really, that is why you become a geologist, to go out and examine the rocks to unlock the inner workings of the planet because every piece of the landscape tells a story about how it formed. Whether the rocks area hundreds of millions of years old or erupted in the last century, they record the changes they felt as they formed in a magmatic system, so the better we can understand modern volcanoes like Lassen, the better we can unravel what might have been happening in the distant past. It is all a book and the only way to read it is to go out there and find the pages.

Fondest memory: What else? Poking an active lava flow.

Image: Taken June 27, 2013. NASA Earth Observatory.