Unrest in the VIPS-team!

Hi fellow VIPS enthusiasts!

We are Tobias, Taylor and Emma – the new moderators for the blog “Focus on VIPS”, the official blog for the IAVCEI commission on Volcano and Igneous Plumbing Systems. We got some exciting new things coming up the conduit for the next weeks so stay tuned!

We want you to contribute to our blog!

Did you just come back from amazing field work? What are the methods you use in your lab/group? Did you just publish a new paper? Get in touch with us and contribute to our blog about what’s going on in the field of VIPS. We are aiming to make a new post fortnightly.

We highly encourage early career researchers (ECRs) to contribute to our blog, and let others know what you are doing and to get new ideas on what could be done in future through collaborations. That said, we also hope to attract some of the more experienced researchers in the field to tell us a little about their academic work and careers to inspire ECRs to try new methods or ways. We have a blog-style post format for ECRs and an interview format for the more experienced researchers.

Tobias Schmiedel is currently a Postdoc at Uppsala University, working on magma properties and their effect on the geometry of dykes. He did his Masters in Mineralogy at the Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg (Germany). During his PhD at the University of Oslo, Tobias used laboratory experiments and 3D seismic interpretation to investigate the influence of host rock strengths on the emplacement and geometry of horizontal magmatic intrusions, i.e. sills, cone-sheets and dykes. Tobias likes hosting dinner parties and collecting gin. He is also an expert in dabbling with things in the lab and getting old machines back up and running.

Emma Rhodes is currently a PhD Student at Uppsala University and part of the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (www.cnds.se), working on deciphering the Reyðarátindur Pluton in Iceland. She also works on hazard communication. Emma did her Masters at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand on extrusive dome features at Santiaguito, Guatemala. Emma likes rock climbing and has taken to the Swedish pass times of cross-country skiing and skating. She likes attending Tobias’ dinner parties.

Taylor Witcher just started as a PhD student at Uppsala University in May. Her project focuses on the structural geology of magma as it moves through the upper crust, and she is analyzing the resulting fracture networks in an ancient magma chamber exposed in eastern Iceland. Taylor got her Masters degree at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, where she studied the viscoelastic properties of silicate melts in the laboratory as an analogue to conduit processes during volcanic eruptions. Taylor likes to paint, accumulate houseplants, and jump in any large body of water she encounters.